In this country great ignorance of the laws of Health has prior to the last fifty years prevailed, and consequently preventible diseases have been rampant, and have claimed innumerable victims. Each century has been marked by great epidemics, which have swept through the country, scattering disease and death in their course. In the fourteenth century, for instance, there was the Black Death, a disease so fatal that it left scarcely one-fourth part of the people alive; while Europe altogether is supposed to have lost about 40 millions of its inhabitants, and China alone 13 millions. A century and a half later came the Sweating Sickness (though there were a score of minor epidemics in between). This was carried by Henry the Seventh’s army throughout the country, and so great was the mortality, that “if half the population in any town escaped, it was thought great favour.” Considerable light is thrown on the rapid spread of this disease after its importation, when we remember that there were no means of ventilation in the houses; that the floors were covered with rushes which were constantly put on fresh without removing the old, thus concealing a mass of filth and exhaling a noisome vapour; while clothing was immoderately warm and seldom changed; baths were very seldom indulged in, and soap hardly used.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were five or six epidemics of The Plague, and it was only eradicated from London, when all the houses from Temple Bar to the Tower were burned down in the Great Fire of September 2nd, 1666, which destroyed the insanitary and necessitated the building of new and larger houses.
Scurvy, jail-fever, and small-pox, are other diseases which were formerly frightfully prevalent. Jail-fever, the same disease as the modern typhus-fever, has now become practically extinct in its former habitat, owing largely to the noble work of John Howard, “whose life was finally brought to an end by the fever, against the ravages of which his life had been expended.” This disease was fostered by overcrowding, ill-ventilation, and filth.
Scurvy formerly produced a very great mortality, especially among sea-faring men. In Admiral Anson’s fleet in 1742, out of 961 men, 626 died in nine months, or nearly two out of every three, and this was no solitary case. Captain Cook, on the other hand, conducted an expedition round the world, consisting of 118 men; and although absent over three years, only lost one life. He was practically the first to demonstrate the potency of fresh vegetables in preventing scurvy.