34 Somerville Magazine
A Fever and a Familiar Past:
Where Typhus and COVID-19 Overlap Professor Jo Innes looks back to an 1801 typhus outbreak in the small Bedfordshire village of Langford. She finds there some golden precepts of public health that remain as vital today as they did more than two hundred years ago…
T
he experience of the coronavirus pandemic has, for many of us, been punctuated by the awful novelty of post-lockdown life. Social distancing, hygiene, contact tracing: these measures can seem onerous and confusing. But they have long histories – histories from which we can, perhaps, draw instructive analogies. With this thought in mind, I recently revisited some material I had collected on a typhus epidemic in the Bedfordshire village of Langford in 1801. I was particularly interested in looking at the methods employed by a local magistrate and doctor to handle the crisis.
Until relatively late in the eighteenth century, ‘fevers’ were accepted as a fact of life, as part of the natural cycle.
Until relatively late in the eighteenth century, ‘fevers’ – not then distinguished into different diseases – were accepted as a natural fact of life. Gradually, however, it came to be thought that institutions where disease flourished, such as prisons and factories, could be organised so as to reduce infections; then that the same approach could be extended into the community. A newly expanded army made a perfect testing ground for novel approaches to reducing disease such as improved hygiene and sanitation, with added impetus provided by the rising frequency of typhus epidemics that accompanied increased industrialisation. On to Bedfordshire in 1801. That year saw yet another terrible harvest, and, predictably, a fever epidemic. The papers relating to Langford’s experience can be found in the archive of Samuel Whitbread, at the time a major local landowner, a magistrate, and an MP. Whitbread was a fiery radical, sympathetic to the French Revolution, who had even tried to get minimum-wage legislation passed
The Windmill fixed on Newgate Prison to work the ventilators that would, it was hoped, remove diseasebearing vapours
during harvest crises in 1795 and 1801. He was also a member of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, founded in 1798, whose newsletter encouraged supporters to implement new initiatives in their neighbourhoods – including new approaches to fever. Hearing that there was fever in Langford, Whitbread stretched his authority to the limit and invoked a 1790 law passed by his
