The cause whereof, I see none so great as the licentiousness, and beastly disorder of a great number of rogues, and vagabonds: the filthy life of many lewd and idle persons, both men, and women, about the city of London, and the great number of lewd alehouses, which are the very nests and harborers of such filthy creatures.
For Puritans the pox was a visible sign of God’s retribution which brought a swift, appropriate and painful punishment on those who made use of the prostitutes’ ‘abominable services’. The numbers of people dying from the pox in the Bills of Mortality were more than likely significantly underestimated. John Graunt stated that ‘few of those, who die of the French-Pox, are set down, but coloured under the Consumption’.
Tubercular conditions such as ‘The King’s Evil’, scrofula (which affected the lymphatic glands) and what was then known as ‘consumption’ and phthisis were all major causes of death. They were spread largely by breathing in air exhaled by someone already suffering from tuberculosis. Bovine tuberculosis was contracted by drinking infected milk. From the twelfth to the eighteenth century English monarchs were thought to possess the ability to cure scrofula by touching the sufferers with their fingers. Queen Mary II (r. 1688–94) died of scrofula at Christmas 1694. It is little wonder that her husband William III (r. 1688–1702) was sceptical about the custom of curing by the ‘Royal touch’. The two-year-old Samuel Johnson, who suffered from scrofula, came to London in 1709 to be touched by Queen Anne (r. 1702–14), the last monarch to perform the practice. The first specialist service in London to deal with the disease was the Phthisical Dispensary in Chancery Lane in 1805 and others followed during the nineteenth century. The main form of treatment was fresh air and good nutrition. London unfortunately did not offer much of the former and in the late nineteenth century the Metropolitan Asylums Board established sanatoria outside the city. The virulent nature of the disease is reflected in a famous cartoon in Punch from July 1858 where the very bedraggled and polluted-looking ‘Father Thames’ introduces his offspring ‘Diphtheria, Scrofula and Cholera to the fair city of London’.
Ague or ‘intermittent fever’ was malaria (mal’aria, literally meaning ‘bad air’). It was a common condition spread by the mosquitoes in the marshes, especially on the south bank of the Thames in the Southwark and Lambeth areas. The disease caused high levels of mortality in London from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. People with the disease would experience fever, shivering, pain in the joints, sweating fits, headache, vomiting, convulsions and coma. Ague was mentioned in literature over the centuries. Geoffrey Chaucer (1342–1400) wrote in ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’: ‘You are so very choleric of complexion./Beware the mounting sun and all dejection,/Nor get yourself with sudden humours hot;/For if you do, I dare well lay a groat/That you shall have the tertian fever’s pain,/Or some ague that may well be your bane’. Shakespeare refers to ague in nine plays including Julius Caesar. Caesar tells Caius Ligarius, ‘Caesar was ne’er so much your enemy as that same ague which hath made you lean’ (Act II, Scene II). In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the stranded Crusoe, on finding a footprint in the sand which was not his own, ‘shook with cold, like one in an ague’. Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) suffered from a recurrent, malarial-type disease, which was believed to have been the principal or sole cause of his final illness. Changes such as the paving of Westminster in the 1760s and the draining of the marshes around the same time contributed towards the decline in deaths from ague. A writer in 1781 observed that ‘very few die now of Ague in London.’
Environmental forces affected not only those contracting ague. As deaths from ague diminished, deaths from other diseases resulting from the environment and denser concentrations of people continued or emerged: smallpox, typhus, typhoid, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis, infantile diarrhoea and a plethora of other afflictions. The debates concerning the causes of disease, bad air (miasma) or polluted water-supplies culminated in the nineteenth century.
In addition to the diseases, which took a particularly high toll of the London population each year, there were also those that appeared each year and only accounted for very small number of deaths. Some of these however created an alarm beyond their actual figures. ‘Bitten by mad dog’ was a perennial misfortune. There were dangers real and exaggerated from loose dogs. They created fear as potential carriers of disease and rabies as well as contributing to the abundance of excrement in London’s streets. Dogs were purged and slaughtered in huge numbers during epidemics. In the early seventeenth century after an outbreak of plague more than 500 were killed in Westminster. Many complaints were made about wild dogs roaming the streets. Joseph Massie in 1754 raged about the problem of ‘mad dogs’ which had caused many deaths. Pepys recorded in his diary in September 1662 how a child had been torn to pieces by two dogs at Walthamstow. Pleas of insanity were made on the grounds of being bitten by a mad dog. In his defence at the Old Bailey in 1815 for stealing 112 sheep, Joseph Draper claimed that, ‘about sixteen years ago, I was bitten by a mad dog … and I am always insane in the months of July and August.’ Few judges would give much credence to such a defence these days.
Deaths described broadly as ‘Casualties’ or accidents were very common. The Gentleman’s Magazine for February 1731 reported on the cases of a man dropping dead after an apoplectic fit, a couple of men who suffocated while digging a pit, a man gored by an ox in Cheapside, a man drowned in the Thames and a number of suicides including a silk-weaver who cut his throat and a city butler who did likewise after being fired from his job. Everyday accidents of this sort contribute substantially to the lists of mortality.
Accidents in the night were common and were often reported in the newspapers from the eighteenth century. In November 1725 Mist’s Weekly Journal reported that ‘two poor persons were found dead in the Tower ditch; it’s supposed they were in drink, and the rails about the said ditch being much out of repair, these dark nights they fell in and lost their lives.’ On a dark night in January 1726 a couple from Bloomsbury were returning home from a public house in Islington when they both slipped into the pond, and were drowned (Weekly Journal, or The British Gazetteer).
People of all classes were susceptible to attacks of pain and sickness during sleeping hours and many ‘passed away in their sleep’. The hours of sleep find people at their most vulnerable either lying and worrying over matters that seem less important in the light of day or finding that in the early hours, existing pains such as toothache, gout, ulcers and asthma seem to be intensified. The author Thomas Legg expressed this so well when he wrote in 1750 that between the hours of one and two in the morning, sick and lame Londoners were ‘meditating and languishing on their several disorders and praying for day-light.’ Over a century earlier Thomas Dekker in The Wonderfull Yeare vividly described the screams of pain from plague victims echoing through the streets in 1603. He wrote of how the narrow London streets at night were filled with the appalling groans of the sick and dying. During the Great Plague, night burials were the norm. Samuel Pepys commented on 12 August 1665 that the nights were too short to bury all the dead and that he was particularly conscious of the danger and the unpleasantness which ensued upon meeting corpses being carried out at night.
The watchmen or ‘Charlies’ attempted to keep an eye on the city and its population as it slept. Their responsibilities had a wide brief which included alerting the authorities when fire broke out, deterring criminal activity by their presence and providing people with information about the weather and the hour by their regular cries. In a particular fracas in 1752, fuelled by alcohol, the watchmen threw twenty-six women into a ‘roundhouse’ where four died of suffocation.
The multitude of streets, alleys and lanes remained dark or at best badly-illuminated unless it was a good moonlit night. During the early part of the fifteenth century the mayor decreed that there should be lights displayed on houses on the main thoroughfares between October and November. Whilst the eighteenth century saw the use of oil lamps for street lightin
g in London it was not until the early nineteenth century that a more significant breakthrough occurred. A German immigrant, Frederick Winsor, formed the New Light and Heat Company which provided gas lighting in 1807 on the north side of Pall Mall. Five years later the Gas Light and Coke Company was formed and was given the rights to light the City, Westminster and Southwark. By the mid-nineteenth century nearly 400 lamp-lighters were employed to light the burners at dusk and turn them off at dawn. Before the nineteenth century, London had relied on a combination of oil lamps, lanterns, candles, moonlight and torches which were carried to light the way through the murky streets and narrow passages. Linkboys, mainly orphans, carried torches or lanterns and hired themselves to anyone seeking guidance through the city at night. Many of these congregated around Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Tower Bridge but they also gained a reputation for thieving and other criminal activity.
Drowning appears each year in the Bills of Mortality and newspapers often reported on such incidents. Mist’s Weekly Journal reported on 17 May 1725:
A man going down to the Thames side to drown a cat, got into a boat, and threw her into the water, and going to strike her on the head with the boat-hook, over-reach’d himself, fell into the water, and was drown’d.
On 26 March 1726 the same journal also reported that someone had ‘drowned in the river of Thames at St. Katherine by the Tower.’ Many drowned in places other than the Thames, as the London Post for 6–9 March 1702 recorded:
Yesterday a cooper belonging to Mr. Halsey’s brew-house, in Deadmans-Place in Southwark, was repairing some fault in one of the tuns, while the beer was working therein, fell in, and was unfortunately drowned.
Mist’s Weekly Journal for 22 May 1725 noted that on Tuesday morning a well-dressed man was found drowned in a pond in St George’s Fields.
Foolhardy deeds could have fatal consequences. As the Grub Street Journal recorded in May 1730:
Yesterday a person rashly attempting, for a wager, to lower himself, by the means of a rope, fastened to the gallery of the Monument, to the bottom; before he had descended 12 yards, had the terrible misfortune, by the rope’s breaking, to break his neck by the fall.
Death from traffic was not uncommon as the Bills of Mortality for cart accidents show. John Strype commented in 1720 on the dangers of encroaching on the highway and of coaches being driven dangerously along the narrow roads. Many drivers were convicted of manslaughter such as the two men in 1721 found guilty of a hit-and-run incident which killed a mother and her child in Whitechapel. In May 1730 the Grub Street Journal reported in a gory style that ‘as several young people were gathered about a milk-woman’s garland, a cart came by, and in their endeavouring to get away, a boy about six years old was pushed down, and the cart wheel ran over his head, and squeezed out his brains.’
The London Journal from 13 June 1730 recorded that:
two men, seemingly in liquor, passed the Turnpike by Newington Green, and between Stamford-Hill and Tottenham High Cross, riding furiously, one of them came with such force against a Gentleman that was coming that way, that both the horses were killed on the spot.
In September 1731 a drayman was committed to Newgate for driving his ‘dray over a poor man in Rosemary-lane, and breaking his thigh-bone’ of which he died.
Newspapers reported on such deaths as a matter of course. The Weekly Journal reported for 13 December 1718:
Casualties. 1. Burnt to death accidentally at St. Dunstan at Stepney 1. Cut his throat (being lunatick) at St. Andrew in Holborn 1. Drowned accidentally in a ditch at St. Paul at Shadwell 1. Found dead in the street at St. Martin in the Fields 1. Hanged themselves 2, one (being lunatick) at St. Andrew in Holborn, and one at St. Leonard in Shoreditch. Kill’d accidentally by a falling down of two houses at St. Brides 4.
Mist’s Weekly Journal for 22 May 1725 noted that: ‘A black-shoe boy, kill’d by a carpenter at the new Admiralty Office,’ and in the 9 April 1726 edition it noted that, ‘A footman belonging to the Prince stabb’d himself in the throat with a penknife. A journeyman shoemaker in an alley in Shoe-Lane, stepping from his own garret window to a neighbour’s, fell down and beat his brains out.’
‘Planet’ was a category of death in the early Bills of Mortality. It was believed that the planets influenced the workings of the human body as much as the rhythms of the seas and the weather. In particular the moon had the greatest influence on a person’s physical and especially mental health to the extent that insane people were often described as being ‘moon struck’. Between 1583 and 1599 at least twenty-two deaths were attributed to planetary influence in St Botolph’s Parish.
Nineteenth-century London witnessed a huge population explosion. This put pressures on the authorities on matters concerning public health and disease. John Graunt recognised the growth in population in the seventeenth century and the consequences this brought:
That London, the Metropolis of England, is perhaps a Head too big for the Body, and possibly too strong: That this Head grows three times as fast as the Body unto which it belongs … our Parishes are now grown madly disproportionable.
By the mid-nineteenth century London was struggling to deal with the vast amount of human waste of 2½ million people. Without proper sewerage, cesspools and pits under the privy were the normal means of coping. Not only was the smell emanating from houses and streets indescribably awful but this effluence carried its own dangers. In Woolwich in 1829 a woman and her baby fell through the rotten floor into the mire of filth beneath, drowning both of them.
From the ending of the Great Plague in the late seventeenth century and the cholera outbreaks of the 1830s, London was mainly free from major epidemics. Fevers and smallpox were widespread although they did not make any particular impact on the Bills of Mortality. A belief that prevailed in the medical profession for much of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century was that disease was caused by inhaling air which was infected through exposure to corrupting matter. A letter to the Builder from Professor H. Booth in July 1844 summed up this view when he commented: ‘From inhaling the odour of beef the butcher’s wife obtains her obesity.’
The Globe and Traveller for 26 May 1852, reporting on the health of London, noted that smallpox was gaining ground on other killer diseases. During one week in May,
smallpox carried off 38 children and 6 adults. These included a glass painter from Priory Street, Camden Town, aged 22; a labourer from Kensington, aged 24 years; a female servant from Little Camden Street, St. Pancras, aged 31 years; the son of a labourer from Islington, aged 6 years.
Those who had not been vaccinated were clearly more vulnerable. On the death of a four-year-old girl, the registrar, Mr Nason, commented that ‘the whole family, consisting of four, have been attacked with small pox. Two have not been vaccinated, and of these one died; the others are going on favourably.’ The daughter of a labourer, aged nine years, died of ‘smallpox, not vaccinated.’ At No. 9 Queen’s Place, New Street, Lambeth, a four-year-old boy was also recorded as having died ‘without previous vaccination’.
Commenting on the death of a five-year-old girl in 1852, the Registrar stated that ‘this is the second death in the family within 8 days. An open drain at the back part of the crescent and adjacent houses has been frequently complained of, but hitherto without effect. There can be no doubt of its being prejudicial to the health of the neighbourhood.’ Similarly, on the death of a one-year-old boy at Grafton Place who died of convulsions followed by a coma, it was stated, ‘The drains are … very bad.’
Preying on many chronically-ill Londoners were quacks, barber surgeons, apothecaries and charlatans who promised cures for all illnesses. Many of these practioners worsened the condition of the sick and often contributed to the death of many people who desperately spent a fortune in seeking a cure. As in any age, people worried about their ailments, coughs, colds, bowels and pains. In the Early Modern period they had good cause to be more concerned, given the possibility of death or the type of treatment
on offer. The apothecary or physician would attend to illnesses with their gruesome collection of implements and cures. Treatment would involve bleeding, purges and enemas with no guarantee that the condition would be cured. Not surprisingly people made their wills as soon as illness threatened, as the common preamble suggested: ‘Being at present sicke and weake in body but of sound and perfect mind.’
Medicines were concocted from a wide, and to today’s mind, extremely weird, collection of ingredients including worms and millipedes. The apothecary to William III, James Chase, prescribed ‘sixty millipedes bruised in white wine … strained and flavoured with saffron and spirit of maidenhair’ for anyone suffering from difficult breathing. Leading herbalist Nicholas Culpeper (1615–54), who was supplied with herbs from Finsbury Fields, Hampstead and Bow, put great faith in the use of millipedes for pains in the ear. The London Pharmacopoeia, appearing in 1618, was initially for the use of all London apothecaries and contained 963 compound remedies and 1,190 crude drugs used in remedies. These drugs included roots, leaves and animal parts such as ‘horn of a rhinoceros, elephant tusk … frog spawn, penis of a bull, flesh of vipers … oil of foxes.’
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