ABSTRACT
Five orphans of one family deprived of their parents by the fever, a pregnant widow left with six small children by the same fatal cause, and two otherpaupers / ill of the fever, all living in Duke-street, applied to the new workhousein Hull for relief. The extract issignificant in representing the intersection of the most fully developed arm ofpre-Chadwickian public health-oriented medicine, the fever hospital movement, which was strongest from about 1790 to 1820, with the practical wing ofthe evangelical movement, whose most conspicuous leader was Sir Thomas Bernard, a lawyer-philantrophist, and primary founder of the Society for Bettering theCondition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor. The Society fostered a range of approaches and does not fit easily into thecharacter–conditions debate that would sharpen in later decades. In the winter of 1801, the typhus fever prevailed in Duke-street at Hull, and spread by contagion to other parts of the town.
