Disease or Famine? Mortality in Cumberland and Westmoreland 1580-1640.

The article presents a methodology for differentiating between disease and famine and assesses mortality in the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland in England from 1580-1640. All plague is caused by the same microorganism, Pasteurela pestis, but there are three discernibly different forms that the disease can take, bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic. Before the introduction of sulfa drugs and antibiotics, the death rate ranged between 90 per cent of those stricken at the outset of an epidemic to about 30 per cent towards the end of the epidemic. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bubonic plague was predominantly an urban disease, a pestilence of cities and towns that only rarely visited rural areas. Plague in England was also characteristically a warm weather disease, it almost always became dormant during the winter. Epidemic outbreaks of typhus usually begin in winter, when the cold discourages bathing and changing clothes, and disappear with the coming of warm weather. One of the perplexing aspects of this epidemic was its widespread incidence throughout the two counties at the same time. In view of the evidence, the mortality was apparently caused by starvation, not by epidemic disease.