Pandemic

Humans have always lived with various communicable diseases and to a large extent an equilibium based on immunity develops. More serious issues arise when a new disease enters a human population. This can occur due to contact between previously separate human populations, such as the introduction of diseases into the Americas by Europeans, or by transfer from another species. Species which can harbour diseases capable of spreading to humans include livestock such as swine, poultry and cattle, as well as migratory bird species. Other host species include rats. Aggrivating factors in the spread of epidemics to become pandemics have always included long-range trade, climatic change (possibly leading to changes in migration patterns) and social disturbances such as war. Pandemics can themselves lead to further social and economic changes due to factors which include a breakdown of authority or changes in the labor market.

This article looks at the pandemics which have affected Chester and some of their possible causes and social consequences.

541: The Plague of Justianian
The Plague of Justinian or Justinianic Plague (541–549 AD) was the beginning of the first Old World pandemic of plague, the contagious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. There had almost certainly been earlier pandemics, but much less is known about them.

The disease afflicted the entire Mediterranean Basin, Europe, and the Near East, severely affecting the Sasanian Empire and the Byzantine Empire and especially its capital, Constantinople. It is named after the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) emperor Justinian (11 May 482 – 14 November 565). The plague weakened the Byzantine Empire at a critical point, when Justinian's armies had nearly retaken all of Italy and the western Mediterranean coast. The evolving conquest would have reunited the core of the Western Roman Empire with the Eastern Roman Empire. Some historians have suggested that the plague was the final stage in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the onset of the "Dark Ages".

A noted death at around this time was that of Maelgwn Gwynedd who died c.547. Gildas, writing about 540 comments extensively on Maelgwn but does not mention his death, which helps to date the text of Gildas. Gildas appears to be writing at a time when there was a pause in the settlement of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons. This pause may have been associated with an instance of "climate change" brought about by volcanic activity. The extent to which Western Europe was afflicted by famines through an “Extreme Weather Event” of circa 535 AD is disputed, but in 535 the Byzantine historian Procopius recorded in his (AD 536) report on the wars with the Vandals,


 * "..during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness ... and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear..".

Gildas perhaps alludes to a similar dense cloud:


 * "a certain thick mist and black night of their offences sit(s) upon the whole island"

It is possible that this weakening of the sun was due to a volcanic eruption. Various candidates have been put forward for the location of this volcano, but none has been identified with certainty. The co-incidence of plague, war and climatic events has led to much speculation about how these events might be inter-related. Shortly after these events, there was a period of considerable political flux in Britain, with a large number of conflicts taking part in the years 600-685. As part of this cycle of conflicts Chester saw the Battle of Chester c.616.

11th Cent: Leprosy
Leprosy grew into a pandemic in Europe in the Middle Ages, resulting in the building of numerous leprosy-focused hospitals to accommodate the vast number of victims. Exactly what constituted "Leprosy" in various historical times extended somewhat beyond the modern definition of the disease, and at times it appears to have been used as a "catch-all" for any kind of disfiguring ailment or progressive skin disease. The Leper Hospital at Chester was located near the site of St Giles Cemetery at Boughton, and gave the area its sometime name of "Spital Boughton". In 1870-72, John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Spital Boughton so:


 * "BOUGHTON (Spittle), an extra-parochial tract, in Great Boughton district, Cheshire; contiguous to St. John Baptist parish within Chester city."

The assocoation with St Johns is evident from the much damaged statue above the doorway of St Johns. This shows the figure of St Giles whose patronage extends to many forms of diability. The inscription on a stone slab marking the cemetery reads:


 * "Here stood the Leper hospital and chapel of St Giles founded early in the 12th Century and endowed by successive Norman earls of Chester they remained in constant use until 1643 when defensive measures during the siege of Chester necessitated the demolition of buildings outside the city walls. The cemetery remained to mark the site and in time the little village of Spital clustered round it. In 1644 the royalist defenders suffered great loss of life in a gallant sortie in Boughton and many of the fallen were buried here. It was also used for victims of the plagues which ravaged the city in the 16th and 17th centuries. Being extra-parochial the site was granted to the corporation by Charles II in 1685 as a burial ground and through a period in the charge of St John's parish it remains in their hands. When the protestant martyr George Marsh was burnt at the stake on Gallows Hill close by his ashes were collected by his friends and buried here.The last burial took place in 1854."

While the hospital is said to have been founded by Ranulf de Blondeville, earl of Chester but the hospital possibly existed before 1181 as 20 shillings. a year was paid to the 'infirm' of Chester during the minority of Ranulph and that sum was paid in the 14th century to the lepers of Boughton as "ancient alms". Ranulph gave an annual rent charge of 10s. to St. Werburgh's from which the monks were to feed 100 paupers once a year and to give 20d. a year to the lepers of Boughton to commemorate his father Hugh de Kevelioc.

"Leprosy" (or "Hansens's Diseease") is a long-term infection by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae or Mycobacterium lepromatosis. Leprosy has a low pathogenicity and 95% of people who contract M. leprae do not develop the disease. The social perception of leprosy in medieval communities was generally one of fear, and people infected with the disease were thought to be unclean, untrustworthy, and morally corrupt. Segregation from mainstream society was common, and people with leprosy were often required to wear clothing that identified them as such or carry a bell announcing their presence. However, the inmates of the hospital at Boughton enjoyed extensive privileges, which included a toll on all food bought for sale in Chester and a fishing boat on the Dee. The hospital also came to possess land and rents in and near Chester - some came to the hospital with new inmates: land in Eastgate Street was given by the relatives of Yseult, who, 'smitten by the scourge of a visitation from on high', had been admitted to the hospital. When Henry III annexed the earldom of Chester after 1237 he proved a generous patron of the hospital. Between 1237 and 1240 he gave £5 yearly and in 1238-9 and 1240 additional grants of 10 marks towards its maintenance. The relations of the hospital with the citizens of Chester and the monks of St. Werburgh's were not always happy. Around 1300 the masters were involved in legal disputes concerning detention of rents, tolls or alms, the Dee fishery, and usury. The privilege of collecting the tolls was still being claimed in 1499 and exercised in 1537 when the city authorities pointed out that, whereas the privilege had originally been granted to relieve the sick, the inmates of the hospital were able-bodied; it was ordered that admissions should be confined to the sick of the city of Chester on penalty of loss of the market tolls. Also in 1537 the inmates were forbidden to wash food or clothes in the newly built conduit at Boughton (which transported water from the Boughton springs to the town and abbey) and were ordered to prevent their animals damaging the conduit and to see that the pipes were properly covered.

1350: The Black Death
Responsible for the death of one-third of the world population, this second large outbreak of the bubonic plague possibly started in Asia and moved west in caravans. Entering through Sicily in 1347 A.D. when plague sufferers arrived in the port of Messina, it spread throughout Europe rapidly. Edward III, crowned king of England in 1327, lost his fourteen-year-old daughter Joan to the lethal clutches of are earlier wave of plague. Nearly fifty years later, his grandson King Richard II was stricken with the same grief when his wife, Queen Anne of Bohemia, succumbed to it.

The word "quarantine" originates from quarantena, the Venetian language form, meaning "forty days". This is due to the 40-day isolation of ships and people practised as a measure of disease prevention related to the plague. A document from 1377 states that before entering the city-state of Ragusa in Dalmatia (modern Dubrovnik in Croatia), newcomers had to spend 30 days (a trentine) in a restricted place (originally nearby islands, such as Lokrum) waiting to see whether the symptoms of Black Death would develop. The Venetians increased the length of this period giving rise to the modern term. Venice founded the first lazaret (on the small island of Lazzaretto Vecchio adjoining the city) in 1403. A lazaretto or lazaret (from Italian: lazzaretto a diminutive form of the Italian word for beggar) is a quarantine station for maritime travellers.

Smallpox
The young monarch King Edward VI was just fourteen when he fell prey to smallpox and measles, and despite a relatively swift recuperation, then succumbed to a bout of tuberculosis which was attributed to the compromised state of his immune system.

1665: The Great Plague
In another devastating appearance, the bubonic plague led to the deaths of 20 percent of London’s population. As human death tolls mounted and mass graves appeared, hundreds of thousands of cats and dogs were slaughtered as the possible cause.

Chester in 1603-5
Although the Midsummer show and fair were cancelled, citizens seem to have flouted safety measurers: John Aldersey, for example, was moved from Eastgate Street to Watergate Street while sick. Richer citizens, perhaps more worried about the state of their businesses after the first phase than about the disease itself, may have delayed flight too long. William Aldersey, another former mayor, left only when the weekly death-toll reached 58 and his next-door neighbour's family had been almost wiped-out.

In the long term, the double epidemic of 1603-5 was not a serious demographic setback for Chester. Only in the final year was there a net loss in numbers of householders. For a time afterwards families may have been on average smaller, though there seems to have been an immediate baby-boom.

Chester in 1647
The plague arrived in June 1647, perhaps with troops bound for Ireland. The onslaught was unprecedented. In 16 weeks 1,863 people died. The first week alone claimed 64 victims, more than the week of highest mortality in 1605. The peak was the seventh week, with 209 dead, and the worst of the epidemic was over in the sixteenth week with 52 dead, after which there was a long tail of intermittent deaths, lasting until April 1648 and numbering 236. The plague was reported as taking its victims 'very strangely, strikes them black of one side, and then they run mad;. . . they die within a few hours'. It was evidently bubonic plague, and Chester was one of two places in the British Isles hit hardest in the outbreak. Total deaths between June 1647 and April 1648 amounted to 2,099, perhaps 35 per cent of the population if it had remained stable after the end of the siege. By contrast with the epidemic of 1603-5, recovery was slow. In the 1650s even prosperous parishes like St. Peter's and St. Michael's had only two thirds of their pre-plague population. Chester did not recover from the combined effects of the siege and the epidemic until perhaps 1700.

Cholera
Though cholera has been around for many centuries, the disease came to prominence in the 19th century where there were a series of pandemics. The second pandemic originated in India and spread along trade and military routes to Eastern and Central Asia and the Middle East.

1832
By autumn of 1830, cholera had made it to Moscow. The spread of the disease temporarily slowed during the winter, but picked up again in spring of 1831, reaching Finland and Poland. It then passed into Hungary and Germany. The disease subsequently spread throughout Europe, including reaching Great Britain for the first time via the port of Sunderland in late 1831. The public became gripped with widespread fear of the disease and distrust of authority figures, most of all doctors. Unbalanced press reporting led people to think that more victims died in the hospital than their homes, and the public began to believe that victims taken to hospitals were killed by doctors for anatomical dissection, an outcome they referred to as "Burking". This fear resulted in several "cholera riots" in Liverpool during 1832. 1832 was also a year of political gatherings: the cholera had occurred at the same time as the struggle for parliamentary reform that culminated in the passage of the Great Reform Act in June 1832. Hostility was a common feature of the popular response to the epidemic across Europe. In European cities it often centred upon conspiracy theories about the poisoning of the poor by doctors on behalf of the upper classes.

Cholera riots were also not just an English phenomenon. The Cholera Riots (Холерные бунты) in Russia started due to the anti-cholera measures, undertaken by the tsarist government, such as quarantine, armed cordons and migratory restrictions. Influenced by rumors of deliberate contamination of ordinary people by government officials and doctors, agitated mobs started raiding police departments and state hospitals, killing hated functionaries, officers, landowners and gentry. In Britain the first riots appear to have been in Aberdeen. The city of Liverpool experienced more riots than elsewhere. Between 29 May and 10 June 1832, eight major street riots occurred, with several other minor disturbances. The "Burking" issue was of special concern to the Liverpool citizenry because in 1826, thirty-three bodies had been discovered on the Liverpool docks, about to be shipped to Scotland for dissection. Two years later a local surgeon, William Gill, was tried and found guilty of running an extensive local grave robbing system to supply corpses for his dissection rooms.

1866
The 1866 Chester Cholera epidemic followed a cattle plague the previous year. At the time people believed that this was due to drinking water being contaminated by surface drainage from places where dead cattle had been buried in haste. At a meeting of the Assembly in May 1866 it was decided to provide two places for Cholera wards within the City in case the outbreak reached Chester. One of these was located in a disused farmhouse on the land which was to become Grosvenor Park. The heftiest women from the local workhouse were selected as potential nurses but there was some concern that they were neither honest nor sober, had no training and that it was unwise to put them in charge of either patients or medicines. Fortunately Frances Wilbraham (1815-1905) of Kings Buildings (King Street), a wealthy member of the local gentry volunteered to oversee them. The first two case of cholera appeared on 1st September 1866. One was a woman from a tenement in Goss Street the other Alderman John Trevor, a former mayor and editor of the Chester Chronicle: both were dead within days. The ward in the park was soon full of the sick and dying, but Francis Wilbraham nursed them tirelessly and by November the outbreak began to abate. The Duke of Westminster called Frances Wilbraham the "Florence Nightingale of Chester". The farmhouse was demolished before Grosvenor Park was opened.

1918: Spanish Flu
Between March 1918 and May 1919, approximately 228,000 Britains lost their lives to what is often termed "the Spanish Flu". By comparison the deaths in Britain due to WW1 (1914-1918) were less than three times this figure: about 700,000. Worldwide, it had been estimated that the pandemic killed at least 20-50 million people (possibly as many as 100 million): more in one year than the Black Death killed in a century. Despite its name, the first recorded cases and deaths from Spanish flu were in the US (in Kansas), with later cases in France, Germany, and the UK. Most countries — already suffering from the devastating effects of World War I — imposed censorship on their press. But Spain remained neutral during the war, which meant national newspapers reported freely on the impact of the virus. This, and the fact that the Spanish King (Alfonso XIII) caught it, led to the false impression that the virus originated in Spain. Scientists offer several possible explanations for the high mortality rate of the 1918 influenza pandemic, including a severe 6-year climate anomaly that affected the migration of disease vectors and increased the likelihood of the spread of the disease through bodies of water. Others consider that the virus was a particularly deadly strain, while yet others have concluded that it was no more deadly than other strains and that malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, and poor hygiene, all exacerbated by the recent war, promoted bacterial superinfection which killed most of the victims. Some writers appear to place much emphasis on particular reasons for the high mortality.

In England, the Registrar General’s figures showed four of the five towns with the worst death rates per 100,000 from Spanish Flu were in the North East and Yorkshire – Hebburn (1194); Jarrow (877); Kidderminster (849); Barnsley (835) and Wallsend (828).

Related Pages

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 * Demography 1550-1762;