A history of epidemic pestilences from the earliest ages, 1495 years before the birth of our Saviour to 1848 : with researches into their nature, causes, and prophylaxis / by Edward Bascome.

Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A history of epidemic pestilences from the earliest ages, 1495 years before the birth of our Saviour to 1848 : with researches into their nature, causes, and prophylaxis / by Edward Bascome. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    broken in pieces. On the 5th of October, during the storm a thick mist for several hours darkened the sky. A few days after, on the l7th, a thunder-storm from the south-west destroyed upwards of 500 houses in London: it unroofed Bow church; and at Old Sarum the steeple was struck down, with many dwelling-houses. A.D. 1093, a tremendous inundation occurred in Syria, by which prodigious numbers of the inhabitants and cattle, such as oxen and horses, were destroyed, a.d. 1096-97, 1100, 1103-4, and 1105, pestilence and famine happened from unhealthy seasons; there occurred excessive rains, terrible inundations, severe winters, inclement summers, variable autumns, multitudes of worms (papiliones), and violent hurri-' canes in England, Palestine, and Holland, in which latter place 100,000 persons were drowned by the inroads of the sea. It was during this period, a.d. 1100, that the lands of Godwin, earl of Kent, to this day called the * Goodwin Sands,' were inundated. 1104, a comet was seen. The disease which prevailed in England was an erysipelatous epidemic fever, in which the limbs of the sick were discovered to be thickly beset with black and livid spots, like carbuncles in the plague. Two years after, fevers, fluxes, &c., were rife, and pestilence continued to prevail in various parts of Europe in the years 1108-9,1110-11. There appeared a comet in the years 1107 and 1110. A.D. 1113, the water of the Medway failed so greatly, that the smallest boats could not float in its channel. The Thames about the same period was so low between the Tower and London Bridge that women and children waded over. Owing to so great an ebb of the ocean, the sands were laid bare for a whole day for several miles from the shore: pestilence ravaged Judea. a. d. 1116, severe earthquakes were experienced in the month of December in various parts of England, especially in Shropshire. Two years previously, 1114, several bridges, being built of wood, were broken down in England by the ice, when it thawed after the severe frost. From the year 1120, a pestilential period equal in intensity