Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

THE SERBIAN FEVER.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES.
Sir,-As, happily, typhus fever has almost died out in this country few English physicians have had experience of it. As in the sixties of the last century I had the entire charge, as honorary physician of the Leeds Fever Hospital (about 100 beds) through two several virulent epidemics of typhus, I venture to offer at least one result of my experience. I read in a recent issue of The Times that the Serbian Army suffered far less than the civil population because of the open-air life of the soldier. The two Leeds epidemics were, as I have said, virulent; my house physicians were all attacked save one; three died, and one, after passing through the convulsive form of the disease, barely escaped with his life. Still my brave colleagues, one after another, devoted themselves to this duty. The mortality was very heavy, 16-17 per cent. The late Professor Rolleston, of Oxford, casually remarked to me, concerning the Irish fever, that not a few of the patients carried out into the hedge bottoms as moribund nevertheless recovered. This remark dwelt in my mind for a few days and led me to determine to test open air as a principle of cure. Nothing was then known of “open-air treatment”; every “fever case” was sheltered and coddled. Happily the fear of infection served me where prejudices did not. I clothed the staff warmly and had all the windows taken out of the building or clamped widely open with screws. Our mortality of all cases fell promptly from 16-17 to 6-7 per cent., and the infective activity was much reduced.
I strongly urge that in Serbia every typhus patient should be carried out into the open air, in wet weather a waterproof coverlid would be sufficient protection. Every attendant should wear glazed cotton overalls, not forgetting thus to protect the neck and hair also.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
CLIFFORD ALLBUTT.
The Athenæum, Pall-mall, S.W., April 13.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Comment

Via Rolleston, who has more good quotes, and notes that, while Allbutt had tried the open-air treatment of typhus and typhoid fevers and smallpox at the Leeds House of Recovery, “he had never thought it advisable to try this method in scarlet fever and measles, as it might do more harm than good.” Apparently “routine and prejudice gained the upper hand” after he lost sole charge of the Leeds House of Recovery, and the technique was abandoned (Rolleston 1929).

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• Allbutt, Clifford (1836-1925) (22), Dewsbury-born physician (Leeds Infirmary 1861-89), inventor of the clinical thermometer, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge 1892-his death W/G ·
• Epidemic typhus (2) W/G ·
• George Rolleston (1) W/G ·
• Great Famine (Ireland) (3) W/G ·
• Ireland (24) W/G ·
• Leeds House of Recovery (3) W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (249) W/G ·
• Measles (1) W/G ·
• Open-air treatment (1) W/G ·
• Scarlet fever (1) W/G ·
• Serbia (1) W/G ·
• Smallpox (4) W/G ·
• Typhoid fever (5) W/G ·
• Typhus (2) W/G ·
• World War I (1914-19) (21) W/G ·

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Comment

Via Rolleston, who has more good quotes, and notes that, while Allbutt had tried the open-air treatment of typhus and typhoid fevers and smallpox at the Leeds House of Recovery, “he had never thought it advisable to try this method in scarlet fever and measles, as it might do more harm than good.” Apparently “routine and prejudice gained the upper hand” after he lost sole charge of the Leeds House of Recovery, and the technique was abandoned (Rolleston 1929).

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Similar

19 October 1909: Opening a nurses’ home in Dewsbury, Clifford Allbutt describes their predecessors in the Leeds fever hospital in the 1860s

15 April 1924: Writing to The Lancet, Clifford Allbutt tells how a nursing hack eliminated (typhoid) thromboses in the Leeds fever hospital in the 1860s

2 June 1867: Dr Clifford Allbutt tells the Epidemiological Society that the market will not provide decent housing for Leeds’s poorest

31 July 1846: Pudsey celebrates repeal of the Corn Laws with a 1.725 tonne free-trade plum pudding

8 January 1844: Members of the 70th (Surrey) Regiment of Foot stationed at Leeds riot against a graffito

17 March 1914: Months before murdering his lover, the painter John Currie lectures at Leeds University and has a late-night heart-to-heart with its vice-chancellor, Michael Sadler

11 November 1918: George Ellison of Richmond Hill, Leeds, is the last British soldier to be killed in action in the First World War

3 January 1915: Ex-prime minister Asquith on the Yorkshireness of his then chief whip, Percy Illingworth (Bradford), who died this day of typhoid

9 April 1938: Huge crowds witness air-raid demonstrations on Holbeck and Woodhouse Moors, Leeds

3 June 1917: A mob wrecks and loots Jewish shops and houses in east-central Leeds

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Comment

James Appell:

The wartime discord prompted some soul-searching within the community, which began questioning whether the economic and social bonds between Jew and non-Jew, forged in Leeds by the conditions of the tailoring trade, were really as strong as the trade unions and socialist movements might have portrayed. The Jewish Chronicle offered its own analysis just a few weeks after the Leeds riot concluded:

There has been a very large and sudden increase in the Jewish population of Leeds during the last few years, and that there has in consequence been considerable inconvenience in many directions to the indigenous inhabitants … Towns, like countries, can assimilate only a certain Jewish element in a certain time, and the Jewish addition to the population of Leeds has been too much and too fast.

The rapid entry of nearly 20,000 Jews into Leeds within the space of two generations clearly exerted pressures on the local population. In this respect Leeds may have differed from London and other provincial cities, where Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe was of a longer duration, where an Anglo-Jewish community already existed and where tensions were less marked than in Leeds. Poverty and mode of employment may have united the two groups, but ultimately religious difference divided them. In such circumstances, therefore, Leeds Jews’ identity as Yorkshiremen was only ever going to be fragile (Appell 2019).

Via Lola Fraser, who thinks the perception that Leeds’s (eastern European) Jews were evading military service would have been exacerbated by the Leeds socialist-pacifist convention on 3 June 1917 in support of revolutionary Russia’s withdrawal from World War I (Fraser N.d.).

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