There's Nae Germs Aboot the Hoose

disease and disaster

Ticket to Inchkeith is a tune of my own, titled to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the arrival of syphilis in Scotland in 1497; hence the infectious Latin rhythm. It was some time before Scotland worked out the implications of the syphilis epidemic. In the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland we find an entry of 1 April 1497 from the expenses of James IV while he was passing through Dalry, Ayrshire, on a pilgrimage to Whithorn:

Item, to a woman with ye Grantgore thair iijs. vjd.

He would hardly have given an individual charitable donation like this if he'd seen that there were going to be thousands more. With the epidemic well established, the authorities in Edinburgh ordered all the syphilitics in the city to report to Leith Pier and be shipped to the uninhabited island of Inchkeith in the Firth of Forth. An 18th century history of Edinburgh argues that this wasn't so bad since Inchkeith at least had a fresh water spring. Presumably any of them fool enough to go died soon after of untreated illness and exposure. There's a possibility that this children's rhyme from Fife refers to this episode, since prostitutes visiting ships - one of the likeliest groups of victims - could well be turned into mermaids by the processes of folklore:

Fower and twenty mermaids
Left the port of Leith
Tae tempt the fine auld hermit
Wha dwelt upon Inchkeith.

Nae boat, nor waft, nor crayer,
Nor craft they had, nor oars nor sails;
Their lily hands were oars enough,
Their tillers were their tails.

The island was frequently used for quarantine in later centuries, notably by General Alexander Leslie's smallpox-ridden Covenanting army in 1639.

There is surprisingly little reference to venereal disease in the folklore of Edinburgh. Satirists of the 16th and 17th centuries sometimes wished the "glengore" (which may sound like a brand of whisky, but is actually syphilis) on their targets, and there is this heartless ditty of the early 18th century by Alexander Pennecuik, On the Downfal of THOMAS BUTTER's Nose in the Month of June:

Tom was sae subtile, and sae fu' o' greed,
Nae man could lick the butter aff his bread;
But pox on harlot-women, his disgrace,
They lick'd a nose of Butter aff his face.
It na' take lang time to this mishap,
No, no, the bitches did it in a CLAP.
Who devil took this nose that came away?
Not God! - for he made noses all of clay
And clay grows harder in the summer sun;
But Butter-noses must melt down in JUNE.

Pennecuik wrote many such scurrilous poems, but his victims had the last laugh - he ended in such extreme poverty that he died of starvation.

The Humours of Glen is from a broadside of 1820. It must be a reprint, since the other item in it is an eve-of-execution monologue for the robber Robert Johnston, hanged in Edinburgh in 1818. That was one of the worst miscalculations in the history of instant versifying. The hanging was appallingly bungled. Johnston's legs were still holding him up after the fall, and even though he tried to pull them up himself so as to die faster, he was cut down while still alive, revived again as his veins were cut on on the funeral cart, and rehanged equally slowly amid a near-riot. The balladeer missed all of this in his haste to get his deadly dull bit of metrical reportage published in time for the drop. The tune The Humours of Glen is an Irish one popular at the time, from one of the versions in the Brysson/Sharpe manuscript. I've given the whole of it; most singers would only want to use the first part, but all fit except the third. Nothing in the text suggests that this song is Scottish, but this Edinburgh broadside seems to be the only source known for it. The words in square brackets are my additions to fill in the bits forgotten by the none-too-competent printer. The symptoms in the last verse are only partly those of sexually transmitted disease; the swollen tongue and the "quaking" were mercury poisoning caused by syphilis treatments of the time. Mercury had been in use for centuries, never worked well, and often caused death or injury; even as early as 1509 an Edinburgh physician was imprisoned for poisoning a patient with it.

• Ticket to Inchkeith gif midi mov
• The Humours of Glen

There were three generations of celebrated doctors named Alexander Monro in Edinburgh. The first was mainly responsible for making Edinburgh's medical school into a world-class institution; the last was the anatomist renowned for his public dissections of executed criminals, including William Burke. Doctor Monro is by James Hogg. There are two versions, from 1810 and 1833; this earlier one is more explicit, but the later one has a more energetic opening. One tune for it in the north-east of Scotland (and reproduced in the Greig-Duncan folksong collection) is the jig printed here as the last part of The Highway to Edinburgh. Hogg's own choice was The Humours of Glen. As in many other old Scots songs, the name spelt as "Christy" is pronounced "Kirsty", the way it's written today.

• Doctor Monro

Wherever conventional medicine develops, alternative medicine follows in its wake. Edinburgh was no exception, and has always had the whole range of fringe therapies found anywhere. One of its specialties early in the nineteenth century was phrenology, a forerunner of psychoanalysis built around the theory that character was determined by the degree to which different parts of the brain were developed, which in turn could be read off from the shape and bumpiness of the skull. Invented late in the 18th century in continental Europe by Gall and Spurzheim, it was brought to the English-speaking world was George Combe in Edinburgh, a highly educated man who combined his medical pursuits with fluency in several languages and democratic political ideas influenced by American republicanism. There was a man in Edinburgh is taken from John Anderson's Phrenology in Edinburgh of 1830, which tells the story:

In April 1821, a medical gentleman of Edinburgh, aided by a landscape painter, fashioned a turnip into the nearest resemblance to a human skull which their combined skill and ingenuity could produce. They had a cast made from it, and sent it to Mr G. COMBE, requesting his observations on the mental talents and dispositions which it indicated: adding, that it was the cast from the skull of a person of uncommon character. Mr COMBE instantly detected the trick, and returned the skull, with the following parody of "The Man of Thessaly" pasted on the coronal surface: ...

A tune for The Man of Thessaly is given in John Goss's Daily Express Community Songbook of 1937; it's a seventeenth-century dance tune known as The Drummer, Good Morrow to your Night Cap, or We'll Go No More A-Roving.

• There was a man in Edinburgh

A story that has never yet been told in full is the link between cholera and revolution in 19th-century Europe. The worst years of cholera were everywhere followed by insurrection or dramatic political change: it was not the disease itself that created popular anger, but the selfish, brutal and ineffectual responses of the ruling elite. Edinburgh was no exception. The Cholera Morbus is a broadside from the 1832 epidemic. The city's death toll was around 600, but the song focuses on the fear and hatred of the authorities for their own poor rather on the disease itself. No tune was indicated for it, and the AAAB rhyme scheme is very unusual in Scots songs. One of the few songs known at the time that matches it in rhyme and metre is Robert Tannahill's Gloomy Winter, whose tune I've taken from Gall and Inglis's of 1848. Their version has enough music for three verses and ranges through an octave and a seventh; the first part alone will do for this song, as its verses don't fall into groups of three. Other songs in the same verse form are Whistle O'er The Lave O't and the Northumbrian I Hae Seen the Roses Blaw, but their tunes don't fit as well.

This is the only Edinburgh song about epidemic disease I have found, but the city's way of dealing with it in former ages surely must have drawn angry satire. From 1452 onwards, particularly in the plagues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the council's idea of a public health measure was mass house demolition, which would only have spread plague rats further. The inspiration for this was Leviticus xiv: 34-48, a well-thought-out approach to treating fungal health hazards in damp homes which could be usefully applied to much of Edinburgh's current working-class housing stock, but not even its Author said it had anything to offer in dealing with plague. A horrific city record from a plague of 1530 describes how David Duly of Leith went to St Giles to pray for his sick wife; he was arrested for spreading contagion, taken back to his house and hanged on a gibbet in front of it. The rope broke and he was released and banished; possibly it was meant to break and this was really punishment by mock execution. In the same plague, Katharine Heriot was drowned in the quarry holes at Greyfriars Port for spreading contagion from Leith; the city magistrates must have decided to drown her outside the city walls so that any infection from her corpse would be Potterrow's problem. The leper hospital set up at Greenside in 1591 even had a gibbet erected beside it, to remind the inmates that attempting to escape carried an automatic death sentence. The 1645 epidemic brought the new idea of concentration camps for the infected, built on Leith Links.

Quarantine was again the preferred solution in the 19th century cholera outbreaks. The first and greatest came to Western attention when it killed a third of Earl Moira's army in India in 1817, and spread westwards via Russia. It reached East Lothian in late 1831, and Edinburgh in January 1832; one of the first victims was an Irish woman street singer who had been performing in Haddington, Musselburgh and Tranent. The city was ringed by a police cordon to turn back visitors from these previously-infected areas. Those who got through were herded into an improvised internment prison at Morrison's Close. The army built new iron gates around the Castle to keep the citizens out. Even the Destitute Sick Society, which had collected better data than ever before on the nature and progress of the epidemic, saw its role as herding the infected poor into fever hospitals, which could do nothing to help and a lot to make their patients even sicker. There was a riot in Fountainbridge in March over a man being forcibly taken to the Castlehill cholera hospital. Dr Thomas Latta of Leith discovered an effective treatment for the disease - intravenous rehydration treatment - but was ignored. The response in Glasgow, where the brass band at Partick played through the streets every night to drive the cholera away, was about as effective as any widely practiced medical measure.

The panic about cholera was heightened by the death and burial folklore of the time, exacerbated by the Burke and Hare case of 1829. Cholera victims often underwent convulsions after death, typically involving the legs, which usually started about a quarter of an hour after death and continued for an hour with increasing violence. This led to fears of premature burial. There was a report in the London papers that a man in Haddington had revived after death but had been nailed into his coffin and buried anyway. Nor was panic restricted to the poor. The "Irvingite" upper-class millenarian movement, later to become the Catholic Apostolic Church, began speaking in tongues in 1831; they saw cholera as a prelude to the Second Coming. But despite public fear and official insanity, mass meetings to promote the Reform Bill continued right through the epidemic all across Britain.

• The Cholera Morbus

The first Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh dated from 1729; it was superseded by a new one soon after in 1741. Much of its development in the mid-18th century was an initiative of Lord Provost George Drummond; the composer William McGibbon left his entire estate to it in 1756. Construction of a third Royal Infirmary started in 1870, when antisepsis by carbolic acid had just been introduced by Joseph Lister (1821-1907), Professor of Surgery at the University. There's Nae Germs Aboot the Hoose was written at the time by John Smith, M.D., LL.D., F.R.C.S. and F.R.S.Edin; it was reprinted in a collection of academic verse, Lays of the Colleges, in 1886. The verse about Tyndall recaps the explanation in his book Heat a Mode of Motion of why the sky is blue: diffraction of light by microscopic particles. The tune is the schottische There's Nae Luck Aboot the Hoose, formerly known as The Mariner's Wife, which I've taken from Kerr's Merry Melodies, published in the 1880s. Fortunately Smith's argument was ignored: the old Infirmary, in a filthy overcrowded building once used by the Royal High School, didn't even have toilets.

• There's Nae Germs Aboot the Hoose

The common people's housing was rarely marked by songs. Edinburgh was one of the most densely populated cities in the world from the Middle Ages until late in the nineteenth century. Most cities in the Christian world have separate districts for rich and poor. Edinburgh had these too; in the Middle Ages and Reformation period, the Canongate was largely for the wealthy and the adjacent village of Calton was an industrial slum. But in the Old Town, the divisions went vertically. A typical high tenement would have basement storerooms, ground-floor shops, the next two or three floors occupied by the wealthy, and the occupants becoming ever poorer and more crowded nearer the roof. The buildings went up to 12 storeys and until the nineteenth century there was no piped water, so it was only feasible for the wealthiest to wash. And there were few if any drains. Until late in the eighteenth century faeces and urine were simply poured out into the street each night, to splatter all over the outside of the buildings on their way down. These levels of sanitation would have shocked a Palaeolithic cave dweller.

A description of such a house was left in From the Shade of MacRimmon by Peter Reid (1801-1881), written in the flyleaf of his copy of Donald MacDonald's Collection of the Ancient Martial Music of Caledonia, now in the National Library of Scotland. Reid was one of the pipers who played for George IV in 1822. His band needed a practice room, and hired it from a Leith merchant, Mr D. McCrimmon. When they found out what they'd let themselves in for, they sent this verse to McCrimmon asking him not to charge them rent. McCrimmon finally agreed. No tune is indicated, and couplets like this were rarely ever set to music at any time. The speaker is the ghost of one of the MacCrimmon pipers of Skye, who signs it with a mark that was a little drawing of a bagpipe.

Many of these overcrowded buildings collapsed. The two most politically influential were the fall of 1751 that led to the construction of the Royal Exchange, and a far greater collapse of 1861 in the High Street that revealed a warren of overcrowded housing. After public exposure of these conditions, Henry Littlejohn (1826-1914) invented the idea of "public health", as a fusion of medicine, engineering and politics, with his report of 1865 on the city's sanitation. For the first time the council and Parliament had to recognize that poor housing, dirt and inadequate sewerage were killing their people. The changes this brought about ended the age of avoidable epidemic disease in the city; the 1866 cholera epidemic was the last. Littlejohn's Hame is a strathspey from Scott Skinner's The Scottish Violinist; since most fiddlers own this collection, I've slightly rearranged it to fit the whistle or flute.

• From the Shade of MacRimmon
• Littlejohn's Hame gif midi mov

Contemporary health hazards have their songs as well. Edinburgh has some of the worst air pollution in Europe, mainly caused by private cars but with a substantial contribution from the oil refinery and petrochemical works at Grangemouth, which can put the whole city under 500 feet of brown haze during summer, obvious from any hilltop in Midlothian. A children's song about it from Bo'ness, collected by Ritchie in the 1950s, a parody of Burns's Of a' the Airts, whose tune is William Marshall's Miss Admiral Gordon's Strathspey. The two factories it mentions date from just after World War 1.

Of a' the airts the wind can blaw,
I dearly like the West;
It lends the Scottish Dyes a chance
And gies the Oils a rest.

Nobody has ever claimed Edinburgh's weather was idyllic. As a broadside of 1738 put it:

In Northern Climes a Country lies,
Some think twixt Ursa Major's thighs,
Perhaps the reason makes them guess it
Is that the Bear doth oft bepiss it;
And sometimes, when she lifts her Tail,
She squirts it too with Snow and Hail.

The people of Edinburgh, like most of the British, talk about the weather at every gap in the conversation. In the past there has often been more of it to talk about, and they've done more than talk. Given Scotland's marginal position at the northern edge of the cultivable world, extremes of weather have often meant famine, such as the worst of all Scotland's famines in 1625. And famine has often meant riot and insurrection; most of the meal riots of the 18th century were preceded by climate-induced crop failures. Violent storms have never been frequent, but every century has had its reminders of what the atmosphere can do. The greatest storm to hit Edinburgh in the 19th century, on 24 January 1868, when thousands of trees were uprooted, four Newhaven fishing boats were sunk, and a house was blown down with four deaths. The "Low Q" storm of 1968 did similar damage in Edinburgh, and worse in the west of Scotland. The floods of 2000 were a reminder of what global warming is likely to have in store for the city, particularly for anyone fool enough to have bought one of the many houses recently constructed in areas whose proneness to flooding has been documented for centuries. Scott Skinner's spectacular reel The Hurricane marks a storm of 1893 that caused great damage all over Britain, almost totally destroying the forests of Atholl in Perthshire.

But these were minor squalls compared to some great storms of earlier times. The 16th and 17th centuries saw enormous snowfalls; a fall in 1595 lasted from March 10 to April 14. In 1659 and 1795 cloudbursts flooded the Water of Leith to destroy mills and bridges; a thaw in 1768 sent so much water down the river that shipping in Leith Harbour was wrecked. The two worst storms seem to have been in the 18th century. In 1744 a three-day thunderstorm flooded the Cowgate and Grassmarket boat-deep, hammered the city with hailstones five inches round, deluged Duddingston under a cascade pouring off Arthur's Seat, and struck soldiers in the Castle with lightning bolts. The worst of all was a six-day storm in March 1765 which sank six ships in the Forth with 800 drowned, killed 11 people in the city under falling chimneys, killed 6 by lightning, and in the Borders blocked all roads under drifts 25 feet high, leaving hundreds frozen to death under snowdrifts. At its peak, thousands of people were sheltering in cellars among the crashing masonry singing psalms for the end of the world. There only seems to be one musical commemoration of it: the dance tune The Tempest, published by Neil Stewart, which I have not yet found a copy of.

I have included here an undated broadside that was almost certainly not meant for any specific tune. Verses on the Melancholy Death of John White describes a homeless weaver and most of his family dying in a snowstorm near Penicuik. From the typestyle and the other material this was bound with, it seems to be from the 1830s; the family were economic refugees from the collapse of the Lanarkshire handloom weaving trade that followed the Industrial Revolution. I have not succeeded in tracing this event, but it's very unlikely it was made up.

• Verses on the Melancholy Death of John White
• The Hurricane gif midi mov

In every urban society, awareness of the possibility of disaster leads to insurance against it. Musicians are more prone to ending in destitution than most professions, and in Edinburgh charitable provision for musicians fallen on hard times goes back at least to 1790, when the Edinburgh Musical Fund was set up. It's commemorated in the catchy jig The Edinburgh Musical Fund, by J. Reinagle. I've given two versions of this tune: a simpler jig-like one from Davie's Caledonian Repository for the Violin of the 1850s and a more elaborately ornamented one by Nathaniel Gow, described as a waltz country dance. Unfortunately for Gow, the Fund went bust in 1827, the year before his career was finished by a paralytic stroke.

• The Edinburgh Musical Fund (Davie) gif midi mov
• The Edinburgh Musical Fund (Nathaniel Gow) gif midi mov

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Copyright © 2001, Jack Campin