the range of streets or houses from Buckingham Gate to Chelsea; in which
long line, it is said, that almost every house had a patient or more
under this fever, though these were mistaken for typhus, or at least
thus misnamed. Then it was also about Vauxhall and Lambeth; and to a
great extent among all that scattered mixture of town and country which
follows from Whitechapel, from Bishopsgate, &c., and very particularly
along Ratcliffe-Highway to an indefinite range along the river. In
Lewisham there were in one house nine patients under this fever, which
proved mortal to one. We may also enumerate Dulwich, especially subject
to this disorder, Fulham, Ealing, and the several other villages along
the Thames, as far as Chertsey; and even Richmond, where, as at
Lewisham, there was one house where ten individuals at one time were
suffering under this disease. Whatever was the pestilence last year, it
promises to be much greater in the present one. This is easily judged
from the manner in which the season has set in, but still more decidedly
from the extraordinary prevalence of ague in the spring; since that
which was intermittent fever then, will be remittent in the autumn, or
rather, there will scarcely be a definite season of vernal intermittent,
but the remittent will commence immediately, increasing in extent and
severity as the summer advances, and promising to become, in the autumn,
the greatest season of disease that England has known for this century.
Dr. Macculloch attributes this alarming increase to _malaria_, on
the production and propagation of which he has recently published an
essay, the leading argument of which is, "that as the quantity of the
poison which any person can inspire is necessarily small, and as this
small quantity can be produced by a small marshy spot as well as a large
one, it is the same, as to the production of the disease, whether the
marsh is a foot square or a mile, provided the exposure be complete;
while also any piece of ground where vegetables decompose under the
action of water is virtually a marsh, or must produce _malaria_."