One can get a sense of how ubiquitous it was by noting how many famous figures of the day died from it. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Henry David Thoreau, all three Brontë sisters, Anton Chekhov, Washington Irving, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Walter Scott . . . The toll is so vast that there’s an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to the subject.
