FEVER AND DYSENTERY IN IRELAND.
The history of the public health in Ireland has been so remarkable that it
may be useful to take a continuous view of it in a chapter apart, so far
as concerns flux, or dysentery, and typhus with relapsing fever.
Ireland is a country which would have given Hume, had he thought of it,
the best of all his illustrations of the difficult problem handled in the
essay “Of National Characters”--how far the habits, customs, temperaments
and, he might have added, morbid infections have been determined by
climate, and how far by laws and government, by revolutions in public
affairs, or by the situation of the nation with regard to its neighbours.
Not only is there something special and peculiar in the actual
epidemiology of Ireland, but its political and social history has been apt
to borrow the phrases of medicine in a figure. “First the physicians are
to take care,” says Burke, “that they do nothing to irritate this
epidemical distemper. It is a foolish thing to have the better of the
patient in a dispute. The complaint, or its cause, ought to be removed,
and wise and lenient arts ought to precede the measures of vigour[410].”
And this singular use of the imagery of disease in Irish history might be
illustrated from many other passages of the same orator and essayist, just
as it may be seen any day in the columns of newspapers in our own time.
Giraldus Cambrensis began it, within a few years of the first English
conquest of Irish territory by Henry II. Writing of that singular effect
upon the English settlers by contact with the native Irish, whereby they
became, in the words of another medieval author, _ipsis Hibernis
hiberniores_, he resorts to the medical figure of “contagion” as the best
way to account for it. So again, to overleap six centuries, Bishop
Berkeley in his query “whether idleness be the mother or daughter of
spleen[411],” is trying upon the Irish both Hume’s problem of national
character and the use of the medical figure. And, to take a modern
instance, Lord Beaconsfield used the same figure of the old humoral
pathology, and gave his adhesion to a theory of national characters
adverse to the sense of Hume, when he ascribed the habits and manners of
the Irish, and the course of their national history, to their propinquity
to a “melancholy” ocean.
As far back as we can go in the history, two diseases are conspicuous--the
flux or “the country disease,” and the sharp fever or “Irish ague.” When
Henry II. invaded Ireland in 1172, his army suffered from flux, which the
contemporary chronicler, Radulphus de Diceto, dean of St Paul’s, set down
to the unwonted eating of fresh meat (_recentium esus carnium_), the
drinking of water, and the want of bread[412]. Less than a generation
after, Giraldus of Wales wrote his “Topography of Ireland,” wherein he
remarks that hardly any stranger, on his first coming to the country,
escapes the flux by reason of the juicy food (_ob humida
nutrimenta_)[413]. At that time Ireland was almost wholly a pastoral
country, and a pastoral country it has remained to a far greater extent
than England or Scotland. It is to this comparative want of tillage, an
almost absolute want when Giraldus was there, that we shall probably have
to look in the last resort for an explanation of the two national maladies
that here concern us--the “country disease” and the “Irish ague.” The same
dietetic reason that the dean of St Paul’s gave in 1172 for the prevalence
of flux in the army of Henry II., the want of bread and the eating of
fresh meat, can be assigned for the country disease long after, and, in
some periods, on the explicit testimony of observers. As to the Irish
ague, or typhus fever, Giraldus mentions it in the medieval period; and
Higden, copying him exactly, says: “The inhabitants of Ireland are vexed
by no kind of fever except the acute, and that seldom”--the word _acuta_
being the original of “the ague,” or, as in another translation of the
passage, “the sharp axes[414].” In this pastoral country, according to
Giraldus, there was little sickness and little need of physicians; but
there is hardly an instance of military operations by the English
unattended with sickness among the troops, and famine with sickness among
the native Irish.
The generalities of Fynes Moryson, a traveller of the time of James I.,
who included Ireland among the many countries that he visited and
described, throw light upon the dietetic peculiarities of the Irish.
Having little agriculture, and at that time no general cultivation of the
potato (although they adopted it much sooner than the English and Scots),
they lived, says Moryson, mostly on milk (as Giraldus Cambrensis also
records in the twelfth century), and upon the flesh of unfed calves, which
they cooked and ate in a barbarous fashion. “The country disease” is also
noted. The experience in Ireland from time immemorial, that a bellyful was
a windfall, must have been the origin of a habit observed by Moryson:
“I have known some of these Irish footemen serving in England to lay
meate aside for many meales to devoure it all at one time.” And again:
“The wilde Irish in time of greatest peace impute covetousnesse and
base birth to him that hath any corne after Christmas, as if it were a
point of nobility to consume all within these festivall dayes.” The
Irish slovenliness or filthiness in their food, raiment and lodging
was apt, he says, “to infect” the English who came to reside in their
country[415].
About a generation after we come to the earliest medical account of the
sicknesses of Ireland, by Gerard Boate, compiled during the Cromwellian
occupation[416]. The following occurs under the head of The Looseness:
The English have given it the name of the Country Disease. The
subjects of it are often troubled a great while, but take no great
harm. It is easily cured by good medicines: “But they that let the
looseness take its course do commonly after some days get the bleeding
with it; ... and last it useth to turn to the bloody flux, the which
in some persons having lasted a great while, leaveth them of itself;
but in far the greatest number is very dangerous, and killeth the most
part of the sick, except they be carefully assisted with good
remedies.”
The other reigning disease is the “Irish Ague,” a continued fever of the
nature of typhus:
“As Ireland is subject to most diseases in common with other
countries, so there are some whereunto it is peculiarly obnoxious,
being at all times so rife there that they may justly be reputed for
Ireland _endemii morbi_, or reigning diseases, as indeed they are
generally reputed for such. Of this number is a certain sort of
malignant feavers, vulgarly in Ireland called Irish agues, because
that at all times they are so common in Ireland, as well among the
inhabitants and the natives, as among those who are newly come thither
from other countries. This feaver, commonly accompanied with a great
pain in the head and in all the bones, great weakness, drought, loss
of all manner of appetite, and want of sleep, and for the most part
idleness or raving, and restlessness or tossings, but no very great
nor constant heat, is hard to be cured.” If blood-letting be avoided
and cordial remedies given, “very few persons do lose their lives,
except when some extraordinary and pestilent malignity cometh to it,
as it befalleth in some years.” Those who recover “are forced to keep
their beds a long time in extreme weakness, being a great while before
they can recover their perfect health and strength.”
The occasion of Boate’s writing was the subjugation of Ireland by
Cromwell, in the course of which we hear from time to time of sickness.
The greatest of the calamities was the utter destruction of the prosperity
of Galway by the frightful plague of 1649-50, and by the suppression of
the Catholics, who had brought the port of Connaught to be a place of
foreign commerce[417].
Cromwell’s troops in 1649 incurred dysentery through the hardships of
campaigning. On 17 September, 1649, the Lord General writes from Dublin to
Mr Speaker Lenthall after the storming of Tredah or Drogheda: “We keep the
field much; our tents sheltering us from the wet and cold. But yet the
country-sickness overtakes many: and therefore we desire recruits, and
some fresh regiments of foot, may be sent us.” And on 25 October, “Colonel
Horton is dead of the country-disease[418].”
Another general reference to the “country disease” of Ireland, by Borlase,
is very nearly the same as Boate’s. It is introduced early in the history,
on the occasion of the death in 1591 of Walter, Earl of Essex, earl
marshal of Ireland:
“The dysentery, or flux, so fatal to this worthy person, is commonly
termed the country disease; and well it may, for it reigns nowhere so
epidemically as in Ireland; tainting strangers as well as natives. But
whether it proceeds from the peculiar disposition of the air, errour
in diet, the laxity and waterishness of the meat, or some occult
cause, no venomous creature living there to suck that which may be
thought (in other countries) well distributed amongst reptilious
animals, I shall not determine, though each of these circumstances may
well conduce to its strength and vigour. Certain it is that regular
diet preserves most from the violence, and many from the infection of
this disease; yet as that which is thought very soveraign--I must say
that the stronger cordial liquors (viz. brandy, usquebeh, treacle and
Mithridate waters) are very proper, or the electuaries themselves, and
the like[419].”
From the Restoration to the Revolution little is known of epidemics in
Ireland. It is probable that Dublin and the other considerable towns fared
much the same as English towns. A Dublin physician writing to Robert Boyle
on 27 February, 1682, speaks of a petechial fever, marked by leaping of
the tendons, which had been fatal to very many in that city for these
twelve or fourteen months[420]. With the Revolution the troubles of the
country begin again, and enter on their peculiarly modern phase. For our
history, two characteristic incidents come at the very beginning of the
new period of disorder among the Irish--the sicknesses of the siege of
Londonderry and the unparalleled havoc of disease among the troops of
Schomberg in the camp of Dundalk. In both, the old “country disease,”
which had affected Cromwell’s troops, was the primary malady, occurring,
of course, in circumstances special enough to have bred it anywhere; in
both, the dysentery was attended or followed by typhus fever, the old
“Irish ague;” and although the epidemics of Londonderry and Dundalk in
1689 are properly examples of war sickness, yet the circumstances of each
may help to realize the connexion between dysentery and typhus in the
ordinary history of the Irish.
Dysentery and Fever at Londonderry and Dundalk, 1689.
The siege of Londonderry[421] by the Catholic Irish army of James II.
began in April and ended on 28 July, having lasted 105 days. On 19 April
the garrison numbered 7020 men, and the total of men, women and children
in the town was estimated at 30,000, a number which included refugees from
the neighbouring country and would have been more but for many Protestants
at the beginning of the siege leaving the city and taking “protection” at
the hands of the besiegers. On 21 May, a collection was made for the poor,
who began to be in want. Sickness is heard of on 5 June, when several that
were sick were killed in their beds by the enemy’s bombs. The dread of the
bombs in the houses caused the people to lie about the walls or in places
remote from the houses all night, so that many of them, especially the
women and children, caught cold, which along with the want of rest and
failing food, threw them into fluxes and fevers. The pinch of hunger began
to be felt before the middle of June, about which time and for six weeks
after the fluxes and fevers were rife. A great mortality spread through
the garrison as well as the inhabitants; fifteen captains and lieutenants
died in one day, and it was estimated that ten thousand died during the
siege, “besides those who died soon after.” The want, the dysentery, the
fever and the vast numbers of dead every day must have produced a horrible
state of things; when, on 2 July, five hundred useless persons were put
outside the walls, to disperse as they best could, the besiegers are said
to have recognized them when they met them “by the smell.”
About the middle of June large quantities of provisions were found in
cellars and places of concealment under ground; after that the garrison
had always bread, although the allowance was small. An ingenious man
discovered how to make pancakes of starch and tallow, of which articles
there was no lack; the pancakes not only proved nutritious, but are said
to have been an infallible cure of the flux, or preservative from it. At
length, on 28 July some of the victuallers and ships of war which had been
in Lough Foyle since the 15th of June, sailed up to the head of the Lough
on the evening flood tide, finding little resistance from the enemy’s
batteries and none from “what was left of” the tide-tossed boom of logs
across the mouth of the river. Provisions poured in, and the siege was
raised; but it is clear that the infection continued for some time after,
having been found among such of the released garrison as repaired to
Schomberg’s camp at Dundalk.
The Catholic army is said (by the Protestants) to have lost 8000 or 9000
before the walls of Londonderry, “most by the sword, the rest of fever and
flux, and the French pox, which was very remarkable on the bodies of
several of the dead officers and soldiers[422].”
Not far off, at Dundalk, there began, a few weeks after, an extraordinary
outbreak of war-sickness, which, unlike the pestilence in Londonderry, was
altogether inglorious in its circumstances. In many respects it resembled
the disaster to Cromwell’s troops at the first occupying of Jamaica in
1655-56[423]; but it was worse than that, and it is probably unexampled in
the military annals of Britain[424].
Supplies had been voted in Parliament for quelling the Catholic rebellion
in Ireland, and an expedition was got together under the illustrious
Marshal, Duke of Schomberg. The force consisted of some ten thousand foot,
most of them raw levies from the English peasantry, with one regiment of
seasoned Dutch troops (“the blue Dutch”), and cavalry. While the bulk of
the force was undisciplined, their clothes, food, tents and other
munitions of war were bad or insufficient through the fraud of
contractors. The expedition embarked at Hoylake on the Dee and landed on
the 15th of August, 1689, nearly three weeks after the relief of
Londonderry, at Bangor, on the south side of Belfast Lough. Schomberg took
Carrickfergus, and began to advance on Dublin; but finding the towns
burned and the country turned into a desert, he threw himself into an
entrenched camp around the head of Dundalk Bay, nearly a mile from the
town of Dundalk. His camp was on a low moist bottom at the foot of the
hills. The Irish Catholic army took up a position among the hills “on high
sound ground,” not more than two miles distant from the English lines,
and, being in superior force, in due time they offered battle, which was
declined. Schomberg, who had been joined by the Enniskillen regiments of
dragoons and by men from Londonderry, had under him some 2000 horse and
not less than 12,000 foot at the time when James II. offered battle. The
undisciplined state of his English troops and the suspected treachery of a
body of French Protestants were among the causes that held Schomberg back;
but he had to reckon also with sickness almost from the moment of sitting
down at Dundalk. At a muster on 25 September, several of the regiments
were grown thin “by reason of the distemper then beginning to seize our
men.” The distemper was dysentery and fever. The two maladies were mixed
up, as they usually are in war and famines, the flux commonly preceding
the fever, and perhaps affording the virulent matters in the soil and in
the air upon which the epidemic prevalence of the fever depends. It was
easy to account for the dysentery among the troops at Dundalk; but as to
the fever, there was an ambiguity at the outset which Story is careful to
note: “And yet I cannot but think that the feaver was partly brought to
our camp by some of those people that came from Derry; for it was
observable that after some of them were come amongst us, it was presently
spread over the whole army, yet I did not find many of themselves died of
it.” Where the cause of death is specially named, it is fever, as in the
cases of Sir Thomas Gower, Colonel Wharton and other officers on the 28th
and 29th October. The fever was a most malignant form of typhus, marked by
the worst of all symptoms, gangrene of the extremities, so that the toes
or a whole foot would fall off when the surgeon was applying a
dressing[425].
It seems probable that most of the enormous mortality was caused by
infection, and not by dysentery due to primary exciting causes.
The primary exciting causes were obvious, but seemingly irremovable.
Schomberg had a great military reputation, but he was now over eighty, and
it does not appear that he made himself personally felt in the camp,
although he issued incessantly orders to inspect and report. As the
mortality proceeded apace during the six or eight weeks of inactivity,
murmurings arose against the commander. He was unfortunate in his choice
of a camping ground, and in an unusually cold and wet season. The newly
raised English troops seem to have been lacking equally in intelligence
and in moral qualities. Their foul language and debauchery were the
occasion of a special proclamation; their laziness and inability to make
themselves comfortable called forth numerous orders, but all to no
purpose. The regiment of Dutch troops were so well hutted that not above
eleven of them died in the whole campaign; but the English would not be
troubled to gather fern or anything else to keep themselves dry and clean
withal: “many of them, when they were dead, were incredibly lousy.”
The camping ground not only received the drainage of the hills, but,
strange to say, the rain would be falling there all day while the camp of
the enemy, only a few miles farther inland, would not be getting a drop.
On 1 October the tents on the low ground were moved a little higher up. On
the same date there were distributed among the regiments casks of
brandy--Macaulay says it was of bad quality--which appears to have been
the trusted remedy against camp sickness, as in the Jamaica expedition of
1655. There were twenty-seven victuallers or other ships riding in Dundalk
Bay; but the stores were bad, and the regimental surgeons had come
unprovided with drugs that might have been useful in flux or fever. While
the weather continued cold and wet, there was also a scarcity of firing
and forage. On 14 October all the regimental surgeons were ordered to meet
at ten in the morning to consult with Dr Lawrence how to check the
sickness[426]. Several officers having died on the 16th and 17th, the camp
was shifted on the 20th to new ground, the huts being left full of the
sick. Gower’s regiment had sixty-seven men unable to march, besides a good
many dead before or sent away sick. Story, the chaplain, went every day
from the new camp to visit the sick of his regiment in the huts, and
always at his going found some dead. He found the survivors in a state of
brutal callousness, utterly indifferent to each other, but objecting to
part with their dead comrades as they wanted the bodies to sit or lie on,
or to keep off the cold wind. The ships at anchor had now received as many
sick as they could hold, and the deaths on board soon became as many as on
shore. On 25-27 October, the camp was again shifted, but the sickness
continued apace. At length on 3 November, the Catholic army having
dispersed to winter quarters, the sick were ordered to be removed to
Carlingford and Newry. “The poor men were brought down from all places
towards the Bridge End, and several of them died by the way. The rest were
put upon waggons, which was the most lamentable sight in the world, for
all the rodes from Dundalk to Newry and Carlingford were next day full of
nothing but dead men, who, even as the waggons joulted, some of them died
and were thrown off as fast.” Some sixteen or seventeen hundred had been
left dead at Dundalk. The ships were ordered to sail for Belfast with the
first wind, and the camp was broken up. There was snow on the hills and
rain in the valleys; on the march to Newry, men fell out of the ranks and
died at the road side. When the ships weighed anchor from Dundalk and
Carlingford, they had 1970 sick men on board, but not more than 1100 of
these came ashore in Belfast Lough, the rest having died at sea in coming
round the coast of County Down. Such was the violence of the infection on
board that several ships had all the men in them dead and nobody to look
after them whilst they lay in the bay at Carrickfergus. An infective
principle, once engendered in circumstances of aggravation such as these,
is not soon extinguished. Belfast was the winter quarters, and in the
great hospital there from 1 November, 1689, to 1 May, 1690, there died
3762, “as appears by the tallies given in by the men that buried them.”
These numbers together make fully six thousand deaths, which agrees with
the general statement that Schomberg lost one half of the men whom he had
embarked at Hoylake in August. The Irish Catholic army began to sicken in
their camp in the hills above Dundalk Bay just before they broke up, and
they are said to have lost heavily by sickness in their winter quarters.
The war ended with the Treaty of Limerick, in 1691. The Seven Ill Years
followed,--ill years to Scotland, in a measure to England, and almost
certainly to Ireland also; but it does not appear that the end of the 17th
century was a time of special sickness and famine to the Irish, and it may
be inferred from the fact of Scots migrating to Ireland during the ill
years that the distress was not so sharp there. The epidemiology of
Ireland is, indeed, a blank until we come to the writings of Dr Rogers, of
Cork, in some respects the best epidemiologist of his time, which cover
the period from 1708 to 1734. His account of the dysentery and typhus of
the chief city of Munster in the beginning of the 18th century will show
that the old dietetic errors of the Irish, noted in medieval times, had
hardly changed in the course of centuries.
A generation of Fevers in Cork.
Rogers is clear that typhus fever was never extinct, while the three
several times when it “made its appearance amongst us in a very signal
manner,” are the same as its seasons in England, namely 1708-10, 1718-21
and 1728-30[428]. His experience relates only to the city of Cork, and, so
far as his clinical histories go, only to the well-to-do classes therein;
and although those seasons were years of scarcity and distress all over
Ireland, yet Rogers does not seem to associate insufficient food with the
fever, and never mentions scarcity. The fevers were in the winter, for the
most part, and were usually accompanied by epidemic smallpox of a bad
type, which in 1708 “swept away multitudes.” Nothing is said of dysentery
for the earliest of the three fever-periods; but for 1718 and following
years we read that “dysentery of a very malignant sort, frequently
producing mortification in the bowels,” prevailed during the same space;
and that the winters of the third fever-period, namely, those of 1728,
1729 and 1730 were “infamous for bloody fluxes of the worst kind.” It is
clear that the fever spread to the richer classes in Cork, for his five
clinical histories are all from those classes. The following is his
general account of the symptoms:
The patient is suddenly seized with slight horrors or rather
chilliness, to which succeed a glowing warmth, a weight and fixed pain
in the head, just over the eyebrows; soreness all over his flesh, as
if bruised, the limbs heavy, the heart oppressed, the breathing
laboured, the pulse not much altered, but in some slower; the urine
mostly crude, pale and limpid, at first, or even throughout, the
tongue moist and not very white at first, afterwards drier, but rarely
black. An universal petechial effloresence not unlike the measles
paints the whole surface of the body, limbs, and sometimes the very
face; in some few appear interspersed eruptions exactly like the
_pustulae miliares_, filled with a limpid serum. The earlier these
petechiae appear, the fresher in colour, and the longer they continue
out, the better (p. 5). The fixed pain in the head increasing, ends
commonly in a coma or stupor, or in a delirium with some. Some few
have had haemorrhage at the nose, a severe cough, and sore throat. In
some he had observed a great tendency to sweats, even from the
beginning: these are colliquative and symptomatic, not to be
encouraged. In but few there have appeared purple and livid spots, as
in haemorrhagic smallpox: some as large as a vetch, others not bigger
than a middling pin’s head, thick set all over the breast, back and
sometimes the limbs, the pulse in these cases being much below normal.
The extremities cold from the 6th or 7th day, delirium constant,
tongue dry and black, urine limpid and crude, oppression greater, and
difficulty of breathing more. It is a slow nervous fever (p. 18).
Rogers believed that mere atmospheric changes could not be the cause of
these epidemics: “they may favour, encourage and propagate such diseases
when once begun; but for the productive cause of them we must have
recourse to such morbid effluvia as above described [particles of all
kinds detached from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms]; or
resolve all into the θεῖον τί so often appealed to by Hippocrates[429].”
But, as regards Cork itself, special interest attaches to the following
“four concurring causes:”
“1st, the great quantities of filth, ordure and animal offals that
crowd our streets, and particularly the close confined alleys and
lanes, at the very season that our endemial epidemics rage amongst
us.
2nd, the great number of slaughter-houses, both in the north and south
suburbs, especially on the north ridge of hills, where are vast pits
for containing the putrefying blood and ordure, which discharge by the
declivities of those hills, upon great rains, their fetid contents
into the river.
3rd, the unwholesome, foul, I had almost said corrupted water that
great numbers of the inhabitants are necessitated to use during the
dry months of the summer.
4th, the vast quantities of animal offals used by the meaner sort,
during the slaughtering seasons: which occasion still more mischief by
the quick and sudden transition from a diet of another kind.”
In farther explanation of the fourth concurring cause, he says that in no
part of the earth is a greater quantity of flesh meat consumed than in
Cork by all sorts of people during the slaughtering season--one of the
chief industries of the place being the export of barrelled beef for the
navy and mercantile marine. The meat, he says, is plentiful and cheap, and
tempts the poorer sort “to riot in this luxurious diet,” the sudden change
from a meagre diet, with the want of bread and of fermented liquors, being
injurious to them[430].
Famine and Fevers in Ireland in 1718 and 1728.
Thus far Rogers, for the city of Cork in the three epidemic periods,
1708-10, 1718-21, and 1728-30, two of which, if not all three, were
periods of dysentery as well as of typhus. But it was usual in Ireland for
the country districts and small towns to suffer equally with the cities.
The circumstances of the Irish peasantry in the very severe winter of
1708-9 are not particularly known; if there was famine with famine-fever,
it was not such as to have become historical. But for the next
fever-period, 1718-20, we have some particulars. Bishop Nicholson, of
Derry, writes: “Never did I behold even in Picardy, Westphalia or
Scotland, such dismal marks of hunger and want as appeared he
countenances of most of the poor creatures I met with on the road.” One of
the bishop’s carriage horses having been accidentally killed, it was at
once surrounded by fifty or sixty famished cottagers struggling
desperately to obtain a morsel of flesh for themselves and their
children[431].
This was a time when the population was increasing, but agriculture, so
far from increasing in proportion to the number of mouths to feed, was
positively declining, unless it were the culture of the potato. In a
pamphlet of about 1724, on promoting agriculture and employing the poor,
the complaint is of beef and mutton everywhere, and an insufficiency of
corn. “Such a want of policy,” says one, “is there, in Dublin especially,
on the most important affair of bread, without a plenty of which the poor
must starve.” Another, a Protestant, has the following threat for the
clergymen of the Established Church: “I’ll immediately stock one part of
my land with bullocks, and the other with potatoes--so farewell
tithes[432]!” From this it is to be inferred that potatoes were not made
tithable until a later period, pasture being exempted to the last. For
whatever reason, grazing, and not corn-growing, was then more general in
Ireland than in the generations immediately preceding, much land having
gone out of tillage. The culture of the potato was driven out of the
fertile lowlands to the hill-sides, so as to leave the ground clear for
ranges of pasture. Rack-renting was the rule, doubtless owing to the same
reason as afterwards, the competition for farms. While the Protestants
emigrated in thousands, the Catholics multiplied at home in beggary. A
pamphleteer of 1727 says: “Where the plough has no work, one family can do
the business of fifty, and you may send away the other forty-nine.” Thus
we find the pasturing of cattle preferred to agriculture long after the
barbaric or uncivilized period had passed, preferred indeed by English
landlords or farmers[433].
There were three bad harvests in succession, 1726, 1727 and 1728,
culminating in a famine in the latter year. Boulter, archbishop of Armagh,
who then ruled Ireland, was able to buy oats or oatmeal in the south and
west so as to sell it below the market price to the starving Protestants
of Ulster, an interference with the distribution of food which led to
serious rioting in Cork, Limerick, Clonmel and Waterford in the first
months of 1728[434]. No full accounts of the epidemic fever of that famine
remain. Rutty, of Dublin, says it was “mild and deceitful in its first
attack, attended with a depressed pulse, and frequently with
petechiae[435];” while, according to Rogers and O’Connell[436], the
epidemic fever of Munster was the same. Of the famine itself we have a
glimpse or two. Primate Boulter writes to the Duke of Newcastle on 7
March, 1727:
“Last year the dearness of corn was such that thousands of families
quitted their habitations to seek bread elsewhere, and many hundreds
perished; this year the poor had consumed their potatoes, which is
their winter subsistence, near two months sooner than ordinary, and
are already, through the dearness of corn, in that want that in some
places they begin already to quit their habitations[437].”
Quitting their habitations to beg was a regular thing at a later time of
the year. It was in the course of these bad years, in 1729, that Swift
wrote his ‘Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of Poor People in
Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country.’ The scheme to
use the tender babes as delicate morsels of food for the rich, was a
somewhat extreme flight of irony, not so finished as in Swift’s other
satires, but the circumstances out of which the proposal grew were more
real than usual.
“It is a melancholy object,” says the Dean of St Patrick’s, “to those
who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they
see the streets, the roads and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the
female sex followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and
importuning every passenger for an alms.” Having ventilated his
project for the children, he proceeds to show that “their elders are
every day dying and rotting by cold and famine, filth and vermin, as
fast as can be reasonably expected.”
All the while there was a considerable export of corn from Ireland. In the
beginning of 1730, two ships laden with barley were stopped at Drogheda by
a fierce mob and were compelled to unload[438].
The interval between those years of epidemic typhus in Ireland and the
next, 1740-41, was filled, we may be sure, with at least an average amount
of the endemial fever. Rutty specially mentions it in Dublin in the autumn
and winter of 1734-35: “We had the low fever, called nervous (and
sometimes petechial from the spots that frequently attended, although
probably not essential).” He then adds: “It is no new thing with us for
this low kind of fever to prevail in the winter season;” and gives figures
from the Dublin Bills of Mortality for forty years. He mentions the
petechial fever as being frequent next in January and February, 1736,
corresponding to a bad time of it in Huxham’s Plymouth annals. In 1738 and
1739 the type of the Dublin fever was relapsing, in part at least, the
same type having been seen at Edinburgh shortly before.
* * * * *
The economics of Ireland, at this time, gave occasion to Berkeley’s
_Querist_, a series of weekly essays written in 1737 and 1738, and
collected in 1740, on the eve of the next great famine and mortality[439].
A few of the bishop’s sarcasms, in the form of queries, will serve to show
how anomalous was the economic condition of the country, and how easily a
crisis of famine and pestilence could arise.
“169. Whether it is possible the country should be well improved while
our beef is exported, and our labourers live upon potatoes?
“173. Whether the quantities of beef, butter, wool and leather,
exported from this island, can be reckoned the superfluities of a
country, where there are so many natives naked and famished?
“174. Whether it would not be wise so to order our trade as to export
manufactures rather than provisions, and of those such as employ most
hands?
“466. Whether our exports do not consist of such necessaries as other
countries cannot well be without?
“353. Whether hearty food and warm clothing would not enable and
encourage the lower sort to labour?
“354. Whether in such a soil as ours, if there was industry, there
would be want?
“418. Whether it be not a new spectacle under the sun, to behold in
such a climate and such a soil, and under such a gentle government, so
many roads untrodden, fields untilled, houses desolate, and hands
unemployed?
“514. Whether the wisdom of the State should not wrestle with this
hereditary disposition of our Tartars, and with a high hand introduce
agriculture?
“534. Why we do not make tiles of our own, for flooring and roofing,
rather than bring them from Holland?
“539. Whether it be not wonderful that with such pastures, and so many
black cattle, we do not find ourselves in cheese?”
In several of his queries (381, 383) Bishop Berkeley is driving at the
expediency of domestic slavery. It was two hundred years since the same
expedient had been tried by Protector Somerset in England, during the
intolerable state of vagabondage which followed the rage for pasture
farming under the first Tudors. In Scotland, it was hardly more than a
generation since the institution of domestic slavery had commended itself
to Fletcher of Saltoun, as the only expedient that could free that country
from the vagabondage of a tenth, or more, of the population. England had
surmounted the difficulty long ago, Scotland got over it easily and
speedily when she was admitted to the English and colonial markets for her
linen manufacture by the Treaty of Union[440]. But in Ireland in the year
1740, and until long after, disabilities of all kinds, not only economic,
but political and religious, were fastened upon the weaker nation by the
stronger, the unfortunate cause of their long continuance having been the
costly inheritance of loyalty to James II. and the Mass.
The Famine and Fever of 1740-41.
At the time when the bishop of Cloyne was issuing his economic queries
from week to week (not much to the satisfaction of Primate Boulter),
things were making up for the greatest crisis of famine and pestilence
that Ireland experienced in the 18th century. There had been relapsing
fever among the poor in Dublin in the autumn of 1738, and it appeared
among them again in the summer and autumn of 1739. Rutty’s account of it
is as follows:
“It was attended with an intense pain in the head. It terminated
sometimes in four, for the most part in five or six days, sometimes in
nine, and commonly in a critical sweat. It was far from being mortal.
I was assured of seventy of the poorer sort at the same time in this
fever, abandoned to the use of whey and God’s good providence, who all
recovered. The crisis, however, was very imperfect, for they were
subject to relapses, even sometimes to the third time, nor did their
urine come to a complete separation.”
In October 1739, there appeared some dysenteries in Dublin.
The winter of 1739 set in severely with cold and wet in November, and
about Christmas there began a frost of many weeks’ duration which was
more intense than anyone remembered. It is said to have made the ground
like iron to the depth of nine inches; the ice on all the rivers stopped
the corn mills, trees and shrubs were destroyed, and even the wool fell
out of the sheep’s backs. In January 1740 the destitution was such that
subscription-lists were opened in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford,
Clonmel, Wexford and other places. Bishop Berkeley distributed every
Monday morning twenty pounds sterling among the poor of Cloyne (near Cork)
besides what they got from his kitchen. One morning he came down without
powder on his wig, and all the domestics of the episcopal palace followed
suit[441]. The distress became more acute as the spring advanced. The
potato crop of 1739 had been ruined, not by disease as in 1845-46, but by
the long and intense frost. It was usual at that time to leave the tubers
in the ridges through most of the winter, with the earth heaped up around
them. The frost of December found them with only that slight covering, and
rotted them: “a dirissimo hoc et diuturno gelu penitus putrescebant,” says
Dr O’Connell. Besides putrid potatoes, the people ate the flesh of cattle
which had died from the rigours of the season. Owing to the want of sound
seed-potatoes, the crop of 1740 was almost a blank. The summer was
excessively dry and hot. In Dublin, the price of provisions had doubled or
trebled, and some of the poor had died of actual starvation. In July
dysenteries became common, and extended to the richer classes in the
capital. Smallpox was rife at the same time, and peculiarly fatal in Cork.
Dysentery continued in Dublin throughout the autumn and winter of 1740
(the latter being again frosty), and became the prevailing malady
elsewhere.
On 8 February, 1741, Berkeley writes that the bloody flux had appeared
lately in the town of Cloyne, having made great progress before that date
in other parts of the country. A week after he writes (15 Feb.), “Our
weather is grown fine and warm: but the bloody flux has increased in this
neighbourhood, and raged most violently in other parts of this and the
adjacent counties[442].” This prevalence of dysentery, and not of fever,
as the reigning malady of the winter of 1740-41 in Munster is confirmed
by Dr Maurice O’Connell, who says that the typhus of the previous summer
gave place to it. Dysentery in the winter and spring, preceding the fever
of summer, was also the experience in the famine of 1817. Berkeley treated
the subjects of dysentery, not with tar water, but with a spoonful of
powdered resin dissolved in oil by heat and mixed in a clyster of
broth[443].
As the year 1741 proceeded, with great drought in April and May, typhus
fever (which had appeared the autumn before) and dysentery were both
widely epidemic, so that it is impossible to say which form of disease
caused most deaths. In Dublin during the month of March, 1741, the deaths
from dysentery reached a maximum of twenty-one in a week, “though it was
less mortal than in the country, to which the better care taken of the
poor and of their food undoubtedly contributed.” Bishop Berkeley writes on
the 19th of May:
“The distresses of the sick and poor are endless. The havoc of mankind
in the counties of Cork, Limerick and some adjacent places, hath been
incredible. The nation probably will not recover this loss in a
century. The other day I heard one from county Limerick say that whole
villages were entirely depeopled. About two months since I heard Sir
Richard Cox say that five hundred were dead in the parish where he
lives, though in a country I believe not very populous. It were to be
wished that people of condition were at their seats in the country
during these calamitous times, which might provide relief and
employment for the poor[444].”
It was said that there were twenty-five cases of fever in the bishop’s own
household, which were cured by the panacea, tar-water, drunk copiously--a
large glass, milk-warm, every hour in bed, the same method being practised
by several of his poor neighbours with equal success[445]. In a “Letter
from a country gentleman in the Province of Munster to his Grace the Lord
Primate[446]” it is said:
“By a moderate computation, very near one-third of the poor cottiers
of Munster have perished by fevers, fluxes and downright want.... The
charity of the landlords and farmers is almost quite exhausted.
Multitudes have perished, and are daily perishing, under hedges and
ditches, some by fevers, some by fluxes, and some through downright
cruel want in the utmost agonies of despair. I have seen the labourer
endeavouring to work at his spade, but fainting for want of food,”
etc.
The loss of life must have been great also in Connaught. A letter of 8
July, 1741, from Galway, says: “The fever so rages here that the
physicians say it is more like a plague than a fever, and refuse to visit
patients for any fee whatever[447].” The Galway Assizes were held at
Tuam[448], the races also being transferred to the same neighbourhood, not
without their usual evening accompaniments of balls and plays.
Of this famine and sickness it might have been said, in the stock medieval
phrase, that the living were hardly able to bury the dead[449].
As in later Irish famines, there appear to have been, in 1740-41, three
main types of sickness--dysentery, relapsing fever and typhus fever. In
Dublin, as we know from the direct testimony of Rutty, there was relapsing
fever in 1739, before the distress had well begun, and again in the summer
of 1741, when the worst was over. So much is said of dysentery that we may
well set down to it, and to its attendant dropsy, a great part of the
deaths, as in the famine of 1846-47. But it is probable that true typhus
fever, sometimes of a malignant type, as at Galway, was the chief
infection in 1741, which was the year of its great prevalence in England.
It was characterized by a mild and deceitful onset, like a cold. Spots
were not invariable or essential; they were mostly of a dusky red,
sometimes purple, and sometimes intermixed with miliary pustules.
O’Connell mentions, for Munster, bleeding from the nose, a mottled rash as
in measles, and pains like those of lumbago. One of the worst features of
the Irish epidemic of 1740-41 was the prevalence of fever in the gaols. At
Tralee above a hundred were tried, most of them for stealing the means of
subsistence; the gaol was so full that there was no room to lie down, and
fifty prisoners died in six weeks. Limerick gaol had dysentery and fever
among its inmates, and the judge who held the Munster Circuit died of
fever on his return to Dublin[450].
Rutty says that the fever fell most upon strong middle-aged men, less upon
women, and least of all upon children. The number of orphans was so great
after the famine that Boulter, the Anglican primate, seized the
opportunity to start the afterwards notorious Charter Schools for the
education of the rising generation according to the Protestant creed. In
all the subsequent Irish famines it was the enormous swarms of people
begging at a distance from their own parishes that spread the infection of
fever; and there seems to have been as much of beggary in 1741, when
Ireland was underpeopled with two millions, as in 1817-18, when it was
overpeopled with six millions. A few years after the famine, Berkeley
wrote in 1749:
“In every road the ragged ensigns of poverty are displayed; you often
meet caravans of poor, whole families in a drove, without clothes to
cover, or bread to feed them, both which might be easily procured by
moderate labour. They are encouraged in their vagabond life by the
miserable hospitality they meet with in every cottage, whose
inhabitants expect the same kind reception in their turn when they
become beggars themselves.”
The estimates of the Irish mortality in 1741 varied greatly, as they have
done in the Irish famines of more recent times. One guessed a third of the
cottiers of Munster, another said one-fifth; and it is known that, whereas
in Kerry the hearth-money was paid in 1733 by 14,346, it was paid in 1744
by only 9372[451]. The largest estimates are 200,000 deaths or even
400,000 deaths in all Ireland in a population of less than two millions.
But Dr Maurice O’Connell, who practised in Cork, and saw in Munster the
mortality at its worst, estimated the deaths in all Ireland, in the two
years 1740 and 1741, from fevers, fluxes and absolute want, at 80,000.
Those who saw the famine, fever and dysentery of 1817-18 in a population
increased by three times were inclined to doubt whether even the smallest
estimate of 80,000 for 1740-41 was not too large; but it is clear that the
famished and fever-stricken in the 18th century were in many places
allowed to perish owing to the indifference of the ruling class or the
exhaustion of their means, so that a much higher rate of fatality may be
assumed for that epidemic than for the first of the 19th century Irish
famines.
* * * * *
The distress came to an end before the winter of 1741, when food was so
cheap in Dublin that a shilling bought twenty-one pounds of bread. The
subsequent prevalence of typhus fever and dysentery in Ireland, whether
epidemic or endemic, is very imperfectly known to the end of the century.
It may be inferred that there was in that period no epidemic so great as
that of 1740-41; but it is clear from the records kept by Rutty in Dublin
down to 1764, and by Sims in Tyrone to 1772, that the indigenous fevers
and fluxes of the country were never long absent, being more common in
some years than in others[452].
The year 1744 was remarkable for a destructive throat distemper among
children, described elsewhere, and the year 1745 for smallpox dispersed by
swarms of beggars. In 1746 and 1748, the Dublin fever was relapsing in
part, “terminating,” says Rutty, “the fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth day
with a critical sweat. A relapse commonly attended, which however was
commonly carried off by a second critical sweat.” In 1748, though the
season was sickly, the diseases were not mortal, several of the fevers
being “happily terminated by a sweat the fifth or sixth day.” But there
were also fevers of the low kind, sometimes with petechiae, sometimes with
miliary pustules, though not essentially with either. In the autumn of
1754 Rutty begins to adopt the language of the time concerning a “putrid”
constitution, identifying the fever with the dangerous remittents which
Fothergill was then writing about in London; “it is probable that ours was
akin to them and owing to the same general causes.” In February, 1755, the
fevers were fatal to many, raising the deaths to double the usual number;
they attacked all ages, were of the low, depressed kind, and commonly
attended with miliary pustules. He again identifies them with the low,
putrid fever in London. From that time on to 1758, Rutty has frequent
references to the same fever, under the names of low, putrid, petechial
and miliary. It was at its worst in 1757, and was marked by the remarkable
tremors described by Johnstone at Kidderminster, as well as by miliary
eruptions and by a gangrenous tendency at the spots where blisters had
been applied. In November, 1757, it was fatal to not a few of the young
and strong in Dublin, “and we received accounts of a like malignity
attending this fever in the country[453].” It was still prevalent in the
North and West of Ireland in the spring of 1758. He describes also an
unusual amount of fever in the end of 1762. Sims, of Tyrone, an
epidemiologist in the same manner as Rutty, does not begin his full annals
until 1765; but he sums up the years from 1751 to 1760 as unhealthy by
agues in spring, dysenteries and cholera morbus in autumn, and “low,
putrid or nervous fevers throughout the year[454].” He adds:
“To the unhealthiness of these years the bad state and dearth of
provisions might not a little contribute; the poor, being incapable to
procure sufficient sustenance, were often obliged to be contented with
things at which nature almost revolted; and even the wealthy could not
by all their art and power render wholesome those fruits of the earth
which had been damaged by an untoward season.”
Much of the distress, however, was owing to the continual spread of
pasture-farming, which made the labour of villagers unnecessary[455].
The nearest approach to a great Irish epidemic in the second half of the
18th century was in 1771, as described by Sims, the type of fever being
clearly the same low, putrid or nervous fever, with offensive sweats and
muscular tremors, that was commonly observed in England also in the middle
third of the 18th century. Early in the summer of 1771 a fever began to
appear which, as autumn advanced, raged with the greatest violence; nor
was it overcome by a severe winter. It claimed the prerogative of the
plague, almost all others vanishing from before its presence. It began
twelve months sooner in the eastern parts of the kingdom, pursuing a
regular course from East to West. Some symptoms suggest cerebro-spinal
fever.
The symptoms were languor, precordial oppression, want of appetite,
slight nausea, pains in the head, back and loins, a thin bluish film
on the tongue, turbid urine, eyes lifeless and dejected. After the
fourth day, constant watchfulness, the eyes wild, melancholy,
sometimes with bloody water in them, constant involuntary sighing, the
tendons of the wrists tremulous, the pulse quick and weak, most
profuse sweats, small dun petechiae principally at the bend of the arm
and about the neck. At the height of the fever, on the ninth or tenth
day, the tremulousness of the wrists spread to all the members,
“insomuch that I have seen the bed-curtains dancing for three or four
days to the no small terror of the superstitious attendants, who on
first perceiving it, thought some evil spirits shook the bed. This
agitation was so constant a concomitant of the fever as to be almost a
distinguishing symptom.” The patients lay grinding their teeth; when
awake, they would often convulsively bite off the edges of the vessel
in which drink was given them. They knew no one, their delirium being
incessant, low, muttering, their fingers picking the bed covering. The
face was pale and sunk, the eyes hollow, the tongue and lips black and
parched. Profuse clammy sweats flowed from them; the urine was as if
mixed with blood: the stools were involuntary. Petechiae almost black
came out, having an outer circle with an inner dark speck; sometimes
there were the larger vibices. Bleedings at the nose were frequent.
Those who were put to bed and sweated almost all died. Death took
place about the 13th day.
Curiously enough this disease showed itself even among the middle ranks of
the people, especially those who lived an irregular life, used flesh diet
and drank much. Among the poorer sort, who used vegetable food, the fever
was more protracted and less malignant, but in the winter and spring it
made much greater havoc among them. “Bleeding, that first and grand
auxiliary of the physician in treating inflammatory disorders, seemed here
to lose much of its influence.” It was, indeed, the long prevalence of
this low or nervous type of fever in Britain and Ireland in the middle of
the 18th century that drove blood-letting in fevers out of fashion until
the return of a more inflammatory type (often relapsing fever) in the
epidemic of 1817. In 1770, while such fevers more or less nervous, putrid,
miliary, were beginning to be prevalent among the adults, there was a good
deal of “worm fever” among children. They suffered from heat, thirst,
quick, full pulse, vomiting, coma, and sometimes slight convulsions,
universal soreness to the touch, and a troublesome phlegmy cough. When not
comatose they were peevish. The fever was remitting, the cheeks being
highly flushed at its acme, pale in its remission. It lasted several days,
but seldom over a week, nor was it often fatal. In children under five or
six years, it could hardly be distinguished from hydrocephalus
internus[456]. The same association of the worm fever or remittent fever
of children with the putrid or nervous fever of adults had been noticed at
Edinburgh in 1735. Neither the fever of the adults nor that of the
children will be found, on close scrutiny, to have had much in common with
our modern enteric fever.
The Epidemic Fevers of 1799-1801.
Sims left Tyrone to practise as a physician in London, and with his
departure what seems to have been the only contemporary record of
epidemics in Ireland ceased. The last quarter of the 18th century in
Ireland had probably as much epidemic fever as in England; but it is not
until the years 1797-1801 that we again hear of fever and dysentery, on
the testimony of the records of the Army Medical Board, of the Dublin
House of Industry, and of the Waterford Fever Hospital. At the end of the
year 1796 the health of the regiments in Ireland was everywhere good; but
in December of that year, and in January 1797, the poor in the towns began
to suffer more than usual from fever, and in the course of the year 1797
fever appeared in several cantonments of troops--at Armagh as early as
February or March, at Limerick, at Waterford and in Dublin[457]. The
summer and autumn were unusually wet, so that the peasantry of the
southern and western counties were unable to lay in their usual supply of
turf for fuel. In the course of the winter 1797-98 a considerable increase
of fever and dysentery was remarked among them, and these two maladies
appeared in various regiments in the early months of 1798. This was the
year of the rebellion in the south-east of Ireland, pending the efforts
for the union with England. The British troops were much engaged with the
insurgents throughout the summer, and got rid in great part of the
maladies of their quarters while they were campaigning. But in the end of
the year fever began to spread, both among the inhabitants and among the
troops. It was nothing new for English and Scots regiments to suffer from
fever or dysentery during the greater part of their first year in Ireland;
but the epidemics in the end of 1798 were more than ordinary. The
Buckinghamshire Militia quartered in the Palatine Square of the Royal
barracks, Dublin, lost by “malignant contagious fever” 13 men in October,
13 in November, and 15 in December. From November to January, the Warwick
regiment suffered greatly in the same barrack. The Herefordshire regiment,
833 strong, lost 47 men at Fermoy, mostly from fever contracted in bad
barracks; the Coldstream Guards at Limerick, the 92nd regiment at Athlone,
and the Northamptonshire Fencibles at Carrick-on-Shannon, also lost men by
fever. In July, 1799, not a single regiment in Ireland was sickly; but a
wet and very cold autumn made a bad harvest, aggravating the distresses of
the poor and causing much sickness, which the troops shared. The county of
Wexford, the principal scene of the rebellion, suffered most, and next to
it the adjacent county of Waterford. The fever-hospital of the latter
town, the earliest in Ireland[458], was projected in 1799; the statement
made in the report of a plan for the new charity, that fifteen hundred
dependent persons suffered from contagious fever every year there, showed
that the need for it was nothing new, although hardly a tenth part of the
number sought admission to the hospital when it was at work. Next year,
1800, the managers of the newly-opened hospital gave some particulars of
the causes of fever in Waterford--want of food, causing weakness of body
and depression of mind, but above all the excessive pawning of clothes and
bedding, whereby they suffered from cold and slept for warmth several in a
bed. In the winter and spring of 1799-1800 the poor of Waterford had
epidemic among them fever and dysentery, as well as smallpox. In
Donagh-a-gow’s Lane nine persons died of dysentery between October 1799
and March 1800. The harvest of 1800 was again a failure, from cold and
wet, bread and potatoes being dear and of bad quality. In the autumn and
winter the distress, with the attendant fever and dysentery, became worse.
At that time in Dublin all fever cases among the poor were received into
the House of Industry (the Cork Street and Hardwick Hospitals were soon
after built for fever-cases), at which the deaths for four years were as
follows:
Died in the Dublin
Year House of Industry
1799 627
1800 1315
1801 1352
1802 384
The enormous rise of the deaths in 1800 and 1801 shows how severe the
epidemic of fever must have been. Compared with the epidemic of 1817-18,
it has few records, perhaps because the political changes of the union
engrossed all attention. But the significant fact remains that the deaths
in the Dublin House of Industry in 1800 and 1801 were nearly as many as in
all the special fever-hospitals of Dublin during the two years, 1 Sept.
1817 to 1 Sept. 1819. At Cork, in 1800, there were 4000 cases of fever
treated from the Dispensary; at Limerick the state of matters is said to
have been as bad as in the great famine of 1817-18; and there is some
reason to think that the same might have been said of other places. All
the relief in 1800-1801 came from private sources, the example of Dublin
in opening soup-kitchens having been followed by other towns. The troops
shared in the reigning diseases, especially at Belfast and Dublin; in the
latter city, the spotted fever was severe both among the military and all
ranks of the civil population in August, 1801. The harvest of 1801 was
abundant, and the fever quickly declined. It had been often of the
relapsing type[459]. Dysentery appeared in the end of September, and
became severe in many places in October and November, being attributed to
the rains after a long tract of dry, hot weather. Ophthalmias and
scarlatinal malignant sore-throats were common at the same time.
The Growth of Population in Ireland.
When the history of the great famine and epidemic sicknesses of 1817-18
was written, it was found that this calamity had fallen upon a population
that had grown imperceptibly until it had reached the enormous figure of
over six millions, the census of 1821 showing the inhabitants of Ireland
to be 6,801,827. The increase from an estimated one million and
thirty-four thousand in 1695 was, according to Malthus, probably without
parallel in Europe. According to Petty, the inhabitants in 1672 numbered
about one million one hundred thousand, living in two hundred thousand
houses, of which 160,000 were “wretched, nasty cabins without chimney,
window or door-shut, and wholly unfit for making merchantable butter,
cheese, or the manufacture of woollen, linen or leather.” In 1695, the war
on behalf of James II. having intervened, the population as estimated by
South was 1,034,000. When the people were next counted in 1731, by a not
incorrect method in the hands of the magistracy and Protestant clergy,
they were found to have almost doubled, the total being 2,010,221. This
increase, the exactness of which depends naturally upon the accuracy of
Petty’s and South’s 17th century estimates, had been made notwithstanding
the famines and epidemics of 1718 and 1728, and an excessive emigration,
mostly of Protestants, to the West Indian and American colonies, which was
itself attended by a great loss of life through disease. For the rest of
the 18th century, the estimates of population are based upon the number of
houses that paid the hearth-tax. In the following figures six persons are
reckoned to each taxed hearth:
Year Persons
1754 2,372,634
1767 2,544,276
1777 2,690,556
1785 2,845,932
The hearth-money was not altogether a safe basis of reckoning, for the
reason that many were excused it on account of their poverty by
certificate from the magistrates, and that hamlets in the hills, perhaps
those which held their lands in rungale or joint-lease, often compounded
with the collectors for a fixed sum; so that cabins might multiply and no
more hearth-tax be paid[460]. It is probable that a considerable increase
had taken place which was not represented in the books of the
tax-collectors; for in 1788, only three years from the last date given,
the number of hearths suddenly leapt up to the round figure of 650,000
(from 474,322), giving a population of 3,900,000, at the rate of six
persons to a cabin or house. But it is undoubted that a new impulse was
given to population in the last twenty years of the 18th century, firstly
by the bounties on Irish corn exported, dating from 1780, which caused
much grazing land to be brought under the plough, and secondly by the
gradual removal, after 1791, of various penalties and disabilities which
had rested on the Roman Catholics since the reign of Anne, affecting their
tenure of land, and serving in various ways to repress the multiplication
of families. Accordingly we find the hearths rated in 1791 at the number
of 701,102, equal to a population of 4,206,612. The estimates or
enumerations from 1788, to the census of 1831, show an increase as
follows:
Year Persons
1788 3,900,000
1791 4,206,612
1805 5,395,456
1812 5,937,856
1821 6,801,827
1831 7,784,539
The secret of this enormous increase was the habit that the Irish
peasantry had begun to learn early in the 17th century of living upon
potatoes. From that dietetic peculiarity, it is well known, much of the
economic and political history of Ireland depends. At the time when it was
losing its tribal organization (rather late in the day, although not so
late as in the Highlands of Scotland), the country was in a fair way to
pass from the pastoral state to the agricultural and industrial. It is
conceivable that, if Ireland had peacefully become an agricultural
country, wheaten bread would have become the staple food of the people, as
in England in early times and again in later times; or that the standard
might have been oatmeal in the northern province, as in Scotland: in which
case one may be sure that the population would not have increased as it
did. “Since the culture of the potatoes was known,” says a topographer of
Kerry in 1756, “which was not before the beginning of the last century,
the herdsmen find out small dry spots to plant a sufficient quantity of
those roots in for their sustenance, whereby considerable tracts of these
mountains are grazed and inhabited, which could not be done if the
herdsmen had only corn to subsist on[461].” Twenty years later Arthur
Young found an enormous extension of potato culture, the pigs being fed on
the surplus crop[462]. The motive, on the part of the landlord or the
farmer, was to have the peat bogs on the hill-sides reclaimed by the
spade; the surface of peat having been removed, a poor subsoil was
exposed, which might be made something of after it had grown several crops
of potatoes, but hardly in any other way. Another motive was political;
namely, the multiplication by landlords of forty-shilling freeholder
dependent votes among the Catholics as soon as they became free to
exercise the franchise[463].
Malthus relied so much upon statistics, that he found the case of Ireland,
notable though it was, little suited to his method, and dismissed it in a
few sentences. But he indicated correctly the grand cause of
over-population:
“I shall only observe, therefore, that the extended use of potatoes
has allowed of a very rapid increase of population during the last
century (18th). But the cheapness of this nourishing root, and the
small piece of ground which, under this kind of cultivation, will in
average years produce the food for a family, joined to the ignorance
and depressed state of the people, which have prompted them to follow
their inclinations with no other prospect than an immediate bare
subsistence, have encouraged marriage to such a degree that the
population is pushed much beyond the industry and present resources of
the country; and the consequence naturally is, that the lower classes
of people are in the most impoverished and miserable state.”
In another section he showed that the cheapness of the staple food of
Ireland tended to keep down the rate of wages:
“The Irish labourer paid in potatoes has earned perhaps the means of
subsistence for double the number of persons that could be supported
by an English labourer paid in wheat.... The great quantity of food
which land will bear when planted with potatoes, and the consequent
cheapness of the labour supported by them, tends rather to raise than
to lower the rents of land, and as far as rent goes, to keep up the
price of the materials of manufacture and all other sorts of raw
produce except potatoes. The indolence and want of skill which usually
accompany such a state of things tend further to render all wrought
commodities comparatively dear.... The value of the food which the
Irish labourer earns above what he and his family consume will go but
a very little way in the purchase of clothing, lodging and other
conveniences.... In Ireland the money price of labour is not much more
than the half of what it is in England.”
Lastly, in a passage quoted in the sequel, he showed how disastrous a
failure of the crop must needs be when the staple was potatoes; the people
then had nothing between them and starvation but the garbage of the
fields[464].
What the growth of population could come to on these terms was carefully
shown for the district of Strabane, on the borders of Tyrone and Donegal,
by Dr Francis Rogan, a writer on the famine and epidemic fever of
1817-18[465]. Strabane stood at the meeting of the rivers Mourne and Fin
to form the Foyle; and in the three valleys the land was fertile. All
round was an amphitheatre of hills, in the glens of which and among the
peat bogs on their sides was an immense population. The farms were small,
from ten to thirty acres, a farm of fifty acres being reckoned a large
holding. The tendency had been to minute subdivisions of the land, the
sons dividing a farm among them on the death of the father:
“The Munterloney mountains,” says Rogan, “lie to the south and east of
the Strabane Dispensary district. They extend nearly twenty miles, and
contain in the numerous glens by which they are intersected so great a
population that, except in the most favourable years, the produce of
their farms is unequal to their support. In seasons of dearth they
procure a considerable part of their food from the more cultivated
districts around them; and this, as well as the payment of their
rents, is accomplished by the sale of butter, black cattle, and sheep,
and by the manufacture of linen cloth and yarn, which they carry on to
a considerable extent.”
These small farmers dwelt in thatched cottages of three or four rooms, in
which they brought up large families[466]. Besides the farmers, there were
the cottiers, who lived in cabins of the poorest construction, sometimes
built against the sides of a peat-cutting in the bog. The following table
shows the proportion of cottiers to small farmers on certain manors of the
Marquis of Abercorn, near Strabane, at the date of the famine in 1817-18
(Rogan, p. 96):
Number of Families
Manor Farmers Cottiers
Derrygoon 368 335
Donelong 243 322
Magevelin and
Lismulmughray 319 668
Strabane 302 415
Cloughognal 328 279
The cottiers rented their cabins and potato gardens from the farmers,
paying their rent, on terms not advantageous to themselves, by labour on
the farm. For a time about the beginning of the century the practice by
farmers of taking land on speculation to sublet to cottiers was so common
that a class of “middlemen” arose. One pamphleteer during the distress of
1822 speaks of the class of middlemen as an advantage to the cottiers, and
regrets that they should have been personally so disreputable as to have
become extinct. It is not easy to understand how they served the interests
of the cottiers: for the latter were answerable to the landlord for the
middleman’s rent, and were themselves over-rented and underpaid for their
labour. The system of middlemen did not in matter of fact answer; they
hoped to make a profit from the tenants under them, and neglected to work
on their own farms; it appears that they were a drunken class, and that
they were at length swallowed up in bankruptcy. After the first quarter of
the century the cottiers and the landlords (with the agents and the tithe
proctors) stood face to face; but at the date of the famine of 1817 there
was subletting going on, of which Rogan gives an instructive instance in
his district of Ulster[467].
Under this system of subdividing farms and subletting potato gardens with
cabins to cottiers, the following enormous populations had sprung up in
four parishes within the Dispensary district of Strabane and in four
manors of the Marquis of Abercorn adjoining them, but not included in the
Dispensary District:
Town of Strabane 3896
Parish of Camus 2384
" " Leck 5092
" " Urney 4886
Manor of Magevelin and Lismulmughray 5548
Manor of Donelong 3126
" " Derrygoon 2568
" " Part of Strabane 2796
In the language of the end of the 19th century, this would have been
called a “congested district” of Ireland; but all Ireland was then
congested to within a million and a half of the utmost limit, so that the
famine, which we shall now proceed to follow in this part of Ulster, has
to be imagined as equally severe in Connaught, in Munster, and even in
parts of Leinster.
The Famine and Fevers of 1817-18.
The winter of 1815-16 had been unusually prolonged, so that the sowing and
planting of 1816 were late. They were hardly over when a rainy summer
began, which led to a ruined harvest. The oats never filled, and were
given as green fodder to the cattle; in wheat-growing districts, the grain
sprouted in the sheaf; the potatoes were a poor yield and watery; such of
them as came to the starch-manufacturers were found to contain much less
starch than usual. The peat bogs were so wet that the usual quantity of
turf for fuel was not secured[468]. This failure of the harvest came at a
critical time. The Peace of Paris in 1815 had depressed prices and wages
and thrown commerce into confusion. During the booming period of
war-prices, from 1803 to 1815, farms and small holdings had doubled or
even trebled in rent, and had withal yielded a handsome profit to the
farmers and steady work to the labourers. When the extraordinary war
expenditure stopped, this factitious prosperity came to a sudden end. The
sons of Irish cottiers were not wanted for the war, and the daughters were
no longer profitable as flax-spinners to the small farmers. Weavers could
hardly earn more than threepence a day, and labourers who could find
employment at all had to be content with fourpence or sixpence, without
their food. A stone of small watery potatoes cost tenpence; but the value
of cattle fell to one-third, and butter brought little. By Christmas the
produce of the peasants’ harvest of 1816 was mostly consumed. “Many
hundred families holding small farms in the mountains of Tyrone,” says
Rogan, “had been obliged to abandon their dwellings in the spring of 1817
and betake themselves to begging, as the only resource left to preserve
their lives[469].” At Galway, in January, a mob gathered to stop the
sailing of a vessel laden with oatmeal. At Ballyshannon the peasants took
to the shore to gather cockles, mussels, limpets and the remains of fish.
In some parts the seed potatoes were taken up and consumed. The people
wandered about in search of nettles, wild mustard, cabbage-stalks and the
like garbage, to stay their stomachs. It was painful, says Carleton, to
see a number of people collected at one of the larger dairy farms waiting
for the cattle to be blooded (according to custom), so that they might
take home some of the blood to eat mixed with a little oatmeal. The want
of fuel caused the pot to be set aside, windows and crevices to be
stopped, washing of clothes and persons to cease, and the inmates of a
cabin to huddle together for warmth. This was far from being the normal
state of the cottages or even of the cabins, but cold and hunger made
their inmates apathetic. Admitted later to the hospitals for fever, they
were found bronzed with dirt, their hair full of vermin, their ragged
clothes so foul and rotten that it was more economical to destroy them and
replace them than to clean them.
Some months passed before this state of things produced fever. The first
effect of the bad food through the winter, such as watery potatoes eaten
half-cooked for want of fuel, had been dysentery, which became common in
February, and was aggravated by the cold in and out of doors. It was
confined to the very poorest, and was not contagious, attacking perhaps
one or two only in a large family. Comparatively few of those who were
attacked by it in the country places came to the Strabane Dispensary; but
the dropsy which often attended or followed it brought in a larger number.
The following table of cases at the Dispensary shows clearly enough that
dysentery and dropsy preceded the fever, which became at length the chief
epidemic malady[470]:
_Cases at Strabane Dispensary._
1817 Dropsy Dysentery Typhus
June 23 2 10
July 107 31 60
August 40 22 206
September 9 23 287
At a few of the larger towns in each of the provinces typhus had risen in
the autumn of 1816 somewhat above the ordinary low level which
characterized the years from 1803 to 1816 in Ireland as well as in
Britain. At that time there was steadily from year to year a certain
amount of typhus in the poorest parts of the towns and here or there among
the cabins of the cottiers. Statistically this may be shown by the table
of regular admissions to the fever hospitals of some of the chief towns
from the date of their opening.
_Admissions to Irish Fever Hospitals, 1799-1818._
Dublin, Dublin Cork Waterford Limerick Kilkenny
Cork St. House of Fever Fever Fever Fever
Year Hospital Industry Hospitals Hospital Hospital Hospital
1799 -- -- -- 146 -- --
1800 -- -- -- 409 -- --
1801 -- -- -- 875 -- --
1802 -- -- -- 419 446 --
1803 -- -- 254 188 86 73
1804 415 82 190 223 95 80
1805 1024 709 200 297 90 69
1806 1264 1276 441 165 86 56
1807 1100 1289 191 166 84 81
1808 1071 1473 232 157 100 96
1809 1051 1176 278 222 109 116
1810 1774 1474 432 410 120 135
1811 1471 1316 646 331 196 153
1812 2265 2006 617 323 146 156
1813 2627 1870 550 252 227 183
1814 2392 2398 845 175 221 236
1815 3780 2451 717 403 394 249
1816 2763 1669 1026 307 659 162
1817 3682 2860 4866 390 2586 1100
1818 7608 17894 10408 2729 4829 1924
In 1812 the first step was taken towards the adoption of the Poor Law,
namely the division of the country into Dispensary Districts, which
remained the units of charitable relief until 1839, when the old English
system of a poor-rate and parochial Unions was applied to Ireland. During
that intermediate period much was left to the medical profession, which
contained many well-educated and humane men, to the priests and clergy,
and to charitable persons among the laity. There was fever in many places
where there were no fever hospitals. A physician at Tralee reported that
the back lanes of the town, crowded with cabins, were seldom free from
typhus. Rogan gives two instances from the Strabane district in the summer
and winter of 1815, at a time when the district was remarkably healthy. A
beggar boy was given a night’s lodging by a cottier at Artigarvan, three
miles from Strabane. Next morning he was too ill to leave; he lay three
weeks in typhus, and gave the disease to twenty-seven persons in the eight
cabins which formed the hamlet. A few months after, about a mile from
Strabane, a mother fell into typhus and was visited many times by her two
married daughters and by others of her children at service in the
neighbourhood. Nineteen cases were traced to this focus; “but the actual
number attacked was probably more than three times this, as the disease,
when once introduced into the town, spread so widely among the lower
orders as to create general alarm, and led to the establishment of the
small fever ward attached to the Dispensary.” It was in April, 1816, that
this was done, two rooms, each with four beds, having been provided at
Strabane for fever cases; but at no time until the summer of 1817 were
they all occupied at once.
The epidemic really began there in May, 1817, in a large house which had
been occupied during the winter by a number of families from the
mountains; they had brought no furniture with them, nor bedding except
their blankets, and lay so close together as to cover the floors. Each
room was rented at a shilling a week, the tenant of a room making up his
rent by taking in beggars at a penny a night. The floors and stairs were
covered with the gathered filth of a whole winter; the straw bedding,
never renewed, was thrown into a corner during the day to be spread again
at night. Every crevice was stopped to keep out the cold; the rain came in
through the roof, the floors were damp, and the cellars of the house full
of stagnant water turned putrid. Meanwhile more than a fourth part of the
families resident in Strabane, to the number of 1026 persons, were being
fed from a soup-house opened early in the spring of 1817, while there were
others equally destitute but too proud to ask relief. The rumour of this
charity soon brought crowds of people from the surrounding country, with
gaunt cheeks, says Carleton, hollow eyes, tottering gait and a look of
“painful abstraction” from the unsatisfied craving for food. In the crowd
round the soup-shop, the timid girl, the modest mother, the decent farmer
scrambled “with as much turbulent solicitation and outcry as if they had
been trained, since their very infancy, to all the forms of impudent cant
and imposture.” These soup-shops were opened in all the Irish towns. At
Strabane some of the richer class lent money to procure supplies, for sale
at cost price, of oatmeal, rice and rye-flour, the last being in much
request in the form of loaves of black bread.
The fever, having begun among the houseful of vagrants above mentioned,
made slow progress until June, when it spread through the town, and in the
autumn became a serious epidemic. Meantime the soup-kitchen was closed,
the supplies having ceased, and the country people returned to their
cabins carrying the infection of typhus everywhere with them. By the
middle of October, 1817, the epidemic was general in the country round
Strabane.
The following table shows the rise and decline of the epidemic of typhus
in the town itself.
_Cases of Fever attended from Strabane Dispensary_[471].
1817 1818
Jan. 9 83
Feb. 13 46
March 6 60
April 13 48
May 3 39
June 10 71
July 60 106
Aug. 206 90
Sept. 287 57
Oct. 233 49
Nov. 193 40
Dec. 140 38
The exact particulars from the Dispensary district of Strabane show
clearly how famine in Ireland is related to fever. The epidemic of typhus
was an indirect result of the famine, and was due most of all to the
vagrancy which a famine was bound to produce in Ireland, in the absence of
a Poor Law. In the spring of 1817, said a gentleman near Tralee, “the
whole country appeared to be in motion.” “It was lamentable,” said Peel,
in the Commons debate, on 22 April, 1818, “at least it was affecting, that
this contagion should have arisen from the open character and feelings of
hospitality for which the Irish character was so peculiarly remarkable.”
They gathered also at funerals, and, as Graves said of a later epidemic,
they were “scrupulous in the performance of wakes.” The concourse of
people at the daily distributions of soup was another cause of spreading
infection, many of them having come out of infected houses[472]. Of such
houses, the lodging-houses of the towns, we have several particular
instances. At Strabane, there were four such, which sent ninety-six
patients to the fever hospital in eighteen months. At Dublin, a house in
Cathedral-lane sent fifty cases to the fever hospitals in a twelvemonth;
the house No. 4, Patrick’s close sent thirty cases in eight months; No.
52½ Kevin-street sent from five rooms nineteen persons in six weeks.
The spread of the disease was much aided by the ordinary annual migration
of harvest labourers. It was the custom every year for cottiers in
Connaught to shut up their cabins after the potatoes were planted, and to
travel to the country round Dublin in search of work at the hay and corn
harvests, leaving their families to beg; in the same way there was an
annual migration from Clare to Kilkenny, from Cavan, Longford and Leitrim
into Meath, and from Derry into Antrim, Down and Armagh[473]. In the
summer of 1817 some parishes of Derry were left with only four or five
families. The keeper of the bridge at Toome, over the Bann, counted more
than a hundred vagrants every day passing into Antrim, from the middle of
May to the beginning of July; and the same might have been seen at the
other bridge over the Bann at Portglenone.