Melksham Times Past – The Patterns of Influenza

If you look through enough historic documents, you start to see patterns. This is what fascinates me and has me thinking, “There’s a story in this.” I particularly see trends in burial records, as it was when I was recently recording deaths in the mid-to-late 1860s.

What stood out was an increase of deaths of children and pensioners near the end of 1836 and start of 1837. To me, this flagged an epidemic, which took me to newspapers confirming a virulent influenza outbreak in Melksham at the time. It wasn’t just confined to Melksham; it was an epidemic that started in Russia, headed west through Europe, and then south to Africa.

To this day, we are still treated to annual eruptions of different variations of the flu and encouragement to get your flu shot has already started here in Melksham. Considering the current weather conditions, you might be tempted to wait but the idea is to stop or lessen it before it starts.

Newspapers back then didn’t mince words when describing what influenza does to the body in severe cases. “Death has ensued in a few cases from a very singular cause: the violence of the cough causing such a determination of blood to the head as to induce the rupture of a vessel and consequent apoplexy.”

The treatment in 1836 didn’t have the benefit of a vaccine, which only came into widespread use in 1945. The advice more than 100 years ago was to make our own solution, according to the Wiltshire Independent:

– One tablespoon of sweet spirit of nitre with two teaspoons of paregoric elixir mixed together, then taken in a wine glass full of hot sugar and water before going to bed, and doing this for three successive nights.

– A quarter of an ounce of Epsom salts dissolved in a cup full of warm water and taken on each following morning.

– Keep your feet warm and dry.

A week later, the Sun newspaper advised against self-treatment: “The epidemic commences its ravages generally by the symptom of a cold, more or less severe, which is either neglected or else treated with hot punch at night.”

The 1837 prevention-of-spreading advice was to take seriously the early warning signs and stay home and call a doctor. They cautioned that waiting because you considered your complaint to be only slight and expecting to cure yourself with homemade remedies only spread the disease further and made the doctor’s job harder.

The General Register Office didn’t start recording deaths and their causes, until the third quarter of 1837. For this reason, I can’t be precise about Melksham deaths during this influenza outbreak but the records indicated just enough to tell me that something wasn’t quite normal.

Historic newspaper articles contain a way of discovering causes of death without needing to see the death register but only for those who are well-known in the community, or suffered a catastrophic or mysterious event, or were oddly newsworthy. Percentage-wise, there were very few obituaries and even fewer mentioned a cause, unless volunteered by the family.

One such note-worthy item reported the death of a couple, Mr and Mrs Tasker, who died within hours of each other from influenza. The only problem is that the newspaper got the names wrong, and I only know this because of the burial records.

For you Melksham family genealogists out there, here is the correction:

– Richard Hulbert, born circa 1759, died on 30 January 1837 of influenza and was buried in Melksham Cemetery on 3 February 1837.

– Elizabeth Betty (Ady) Hulbert, born circa 1755, died on 30 January 1837 of influenza, and was buried with her husband (above) in Melksham Cemetery on 3 February 1837.