The small amount of fever in London between the year 1803 and the beginning of the epidemic of 1817-19 rests on the testimony of Bateman[296], who in 1804 took up Willan's task of keeping a systematic record of the cases at the Carey Street Dispensary. He has only two special entries relating to typhus: one in the autumn of 1811, when some cases occurred in the uncleanly parts of Clerkenwell and St Luke's ("but I have not learned that it has existed in any other districts of London"); the other in October and November 1813, when there was more typhus among the Irish in some of the filthy courts of Saffron Hill, near Hatton Garden, than for several years past, the infection having spread rapidly and fatally in several houses. The best evidence of this lull in typhus in London is the almost empty state of the new fever-hospital:
1802 164 1803 176 1804 80 1805 66 1806 93 1807 63 1808 69 1809 29 1810 52 1811 43 1812 61 1813 85 1814 59 1815 80 1816 118 1817 760
Until it was removed to Pancras Road, in September, 1816, the London fever-hospital had only sixteen beds. But Bateman says that no one was refused admission, and that for several years the house was frequently empty three or four weeks together. Also at the Dispensary, in Carey Street, he had an opportunity during the period 1804-1816,
"Of observing the entire freedom from fevers enjoyed by the inhabitants of the numerous crowded courts and alleys within the extensive district comprehended in our visits from that charity." And again, writing in the winter of 1814-15, Bateman says: "To those who recollect the numerous cases of typhoid fevers [this term did not then mean enteric] which called for the relief of dispensaries twelve or fourteen years ago, and the contagion of which was often with great difficulty eradicated from the apartments where it raged, and even seized the same individuals again and again when they escaped its fatal influences, the great freedom from these fevers which now exists, even in the most close and filthy alleys in London, is the ground of some surprise." And once more, in the summer of 1816, just as the new epidemic period was about to begin, he says: "The extraordinary disappearance of contagious fever from every part of this crowded metropolis during the long period comprehended by these Reports [since 1804], cannot fail to have attracted the attention of the reader."