‘An epidemic disease of a very singular nature’: evolving knowledge of the mumps in the eighteenth century

This article analyses the emergence of the mumps as a particular disease with its established pathognomic symptom of swollen parotid glands. In the seventeenth century, the first nosological classification of symptoms by Dr Thomas Sydenham or Dr Giovanni Battista Morgagni relied on a broad category for ailments involving the throat, but did not identify the mumps as a specific illness. Early case studies by Dr Richard Russell and the surgeon Thomas Gooch not only revealed the mumps as having clear symptoms but also discovered that the disease was well known by the British public. These case studies in turn inspired the new nosologists of the 1760s to include the mumps as a separate disease from other throat ailments. However, it was not until Dr Robert Hamilton published his extensive study of the disease in 1790 that the mumps was commonly included in medical guides, not only those for practitioners but also those for domestic use. Examining the mumps as a case study of eighteenth-century medical knowledge both highlights a point where common knowledge contributed to medical studies and details the methods by which disease typologies were refined and expanded to incorporate the information produced by case studies.