ENGLISH EPIDEMICS.*
MR. CREIGHTON has produced a most interesting and striking historical work in his History of Epidemics in Britain.' He has carried the historical method and original research into new and unexplored regions with remarkable industry, ability, and success. Historians have made occasional excursuses into the region Mr. Creighton has made his own, for the sake of studying such striking episodes as the Black Death, the Black Assizes, the Great Plague of London, and the Sweating Sick- ness of Henry N.M.'s reign. But they have hitherto treated of them as isolated phenomena, and in the spirit of the Prayer-Book, or of an insurance policy, as inexplicable visita- tions of Providence, or "the act of God." Mr. Creighton is • A History of Epidemics in Britain, A.D. 664-1666. By Charles Creighton, ILA, M.D. Cambridge: University Press.
the first who has endeavoured to trace these epidemics to their source, to give a scientific account of them, and weave the causes, the appearance, and the consequences of the great and, so to speak, historic diseases into a connected story.
In the present volume, which is, we hope, only an instal- ment of the whole work, Mr. Creighton takes up his tale with the first recorded appearance of the Plague in England in 664, until its disappearance—which is more mysterious even than its appearance—in 1664. In the earlier part of the period, up to the Reformation, he has had to seek his premisses and facts in the scattered and obscure notices of ecclesiastical chroniclers, more concerned, as a rule, to assign an outbreak of disease to some religious default, or to draw a rhetorical pic- ture of portents and destruction, than to describe the symptoms or portray the progress of an epidemic. Yet, by a careful gathering and sifting of the evidence, Mr. Creighton has been able to draw conclusions of considerable certainty.
The striking result as to the Plague, or bubo-plague--not that it has anything to do with an owl as a bird of ill-omen, but because its characteristic sign was a swelling in the groin (ifiSovi3"ip)—is that it was practically endemic in Europe from the great outbreak in Constantinople in Justinian's reign, in 543, until 685, or even later; that it then disappeared till it returned as the Black Death in 1348, from which time it was again endemic till 1666, when it disappeared as suddenly as it came. The present writer does not pretend to an opinion as to whether Mr. Creighton is medically right in his assignment of the vera causa of the Plague; but it is certain that the historical evidence which he has produced is very convincing to the lay mind.
Like the Influenza, the Plague came to England from abroad. It was not of native manufacture, nor even made in Russia," as has been alleged both of influenza and plague, though it appears that, in the Russian annals, its outbreak is imputed to the Cossacks of the Don, and that in Italian history its first ap- pearance in Europe proper was in Genoa in 1347, on the arrival of an Italian ship with traders who had been besieged by Tartars in Caffa on the Straits of Kertch, and in Tana on the Don, amongst whom the plague had broken out and so broken up the siege. But Mr. Creighton points out that there is no evidence of any special conditions of disease in the Don district, while Tana was the south-western terminus of the overland trade with China. An Arabian contemporary writer at Granada, states on the alleged authority of Ibn-Batuba, an Arabian traveller who was in China from 1342-46, that the plague arose in China from the multitude of unburied corpses. The Chinese annals report in 1333 a famine which caused the deaths of two and a quarter millions of families; in 1336, inundations which ruined the harvests; in 1341 and 1342, famines leading to cannibalism ; 1343-46 inclusive, great inundations, earthquakes, and famines. A terrible story is quoted from Friar Odoric, who travelled in China in 1328, of his passing through a valley choked with unburied corpses. In India in 1877, a report of the Sanitary Committee of the North-West Provinces of India dis- tinctly traced an outbreak of plague to the scanty burial of dead bodies ; in 1878, Baber, an Englishman, and Rocha, a French- man, reported precisely the same thing of an outbreak of plague near Talifoo, in Yunnan From these and various other modern instances cited, coupled with the carious fact that shortly before the outbreak of plague in particular houses, alike in modern India and Elizabethan England, rats and mice, and such small deer, have come up from their holes and died gasping, Mr.
Creighton concludes that the Black Death and other out- breaks of the Plague are due to a soil-poison generated espe- cially by the corruption of numbers of unburied or ill-buried dead bodies, and promoted by other foulnesses. In the Middle
Ages, this plague fell on a favouring soil in the closely walled towns, and the churches and monasteries. It is certainly a
striking confirmation of this theory that the Black Death was
especially fatal to the clergy and monks whose habitations were, even in the -villages, close by the churchyards, and whose
cloisters and churches, where they lived all day, were full of the dead ; while it has not reappeared in England since, with the close of the Civil War, the burning of old London, and the cessation of intra-mural interment, the living have given the dead more elbow-room. One curious consequence resulting from this theory, is that the cele- brated case of plague at Eyam, in Derbyshire, in which the Rector, Mompesson, persuaded, or spiritually terrorised, the people into adhering to their narrow glen instead of fleeing, with the result that 259 people died out of 300, was merely another instance of the danger of clerical domination in matters not spiritual. " The villagers of Eyam were sacrificed to an idea, and to an idea which we may now say was not scientifically sound Those who did flee from the houses at the upper end of the village are not known to have carried the infection to other places, and the young woman who brought it to Corber gave it to no one else."
The Influenzas traced by Mr. Creighton in 1510, 1657, and other years, he attributes to an aerial and lighter wave of the same kind of poison as that of the Black Death. We know that there have not been wanting those who traced our present epidemic, in like way, to the Chinese " dead that unburied remain" after the great inundation of the Yellow River. The " Sweating Sickness " of Henry VIII.'s time would appear to have been akin to it.
Mr. Creighton, by-the-way, is so bent on the connection between the Plague and the specific poison of dead bodies, that he advances the contention that the bad sanitary condi- tions of mediaeval England have been grossly exaggerated, if not misrepresented altogether. The sanitary regulations, how- ever, made by the Central or Municipal authorities which he quotes, go to prove directly the opposite. What was the state of the City when such a nuisance as this is reported in Dowgate of two separate householders Diversas latrinas fecerunt, pendentes ultra vicum ejusdem venellie ; quarum putridines cadunt supra homines per eandem venellam transeuntes." This was in Edward III.'s reign. In Henry VIII.'s, things were not much better, according to Erasmus's well-known description of the rushes which lay in the hall for years together, a receptacle for every abomination. Mr. Creighton sneers at Erasmus as " the intelligent foreigner,". and says that the English traveller, Richard of Devizes, in the twelfth century, looked on the foreigner as a person of unclean habits. No doubt in each case, as in that of M. Taine in England and the ordinary undergraduate abroad, each of us sees the mote in his neighbour's eye without seeing the beam in his own. And we may admit at once that, great as has been the advance in sanitary science and administration since the Great Plague, if the Black Death once got into the slums of London, if it did not destroy one-half the population as in 1349, or one- sixth as in 1665, it would yet find a sufficiently favourable reception to slay its thousands and ten thousands. • To turn to another subject, perhaps one of the most in-
teresting parts of the book, historically, and especially ecclesiastico-historically, is the chapter on lepers and leprosy in England. Mr. Creighton disputes the general prevalency of this disease, and imputes the prominence given to it in early foundations to a sentimental feeling about lepers, derived from the New Testament and their being called " Christ's poor." He demonstrates conclusively by an interesting col- lection from records, that by the reign of Edward III. the leper-houses had practically been appropriated by the ordinary ecclesiastic and the common poor from lack of the true leper. He also, from a careful collation of the evidence as to symp- toms, contends that a considerable proportion of the so-called lepers, especially those in high places, were suffering from a less reputable disease, and that the /epra Normannarum, of the twelfth century was, in truth, the same as the Gallicus morbus of the fifteenth, the possession of which, when in attendance on the King, was, by-the-way, one of the articles alleged against Cardinal Wolsey.
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