An epidemic of Throat-disease in Ireland, 1743.
In Ireland the dysenteries, typhus and relapsing fevers, attendant on and following the famine, were hardly over when the plague of the throat began among the children. It was seen first in the summer of 1743 (an influenza having preceded in May and June), it raged through the autumn and winter, and was not extinct for many years after. There were but few instances of it in Dublin, but it was prevalent in the adjoining counties, and exceedingly so in Wicklow, Carlow, Queen’s County, Kilkenny, Cavan, Roscommon, Leitrim, Sligo “and perhaps many others, carrying off incredible numbers, and sweeping away the children of whole villages in a few days.” The country doctors, who knew most of it, were not apt to record their experiences; so that the following account, which Rutty extracted from Dr Molloy, is all the record that remains of an epidemic concerning which one would wish to have known more[1269]:
“It is peculiar to children, and those chiefly of from a month to three, four, five, six, eight or nine years old. They commonly for a day or two, or more, had a little hoarseness, sometimes a little cough; then in an instant they were seized with a great suffocation lasting a minute or two, and their face became livid; they have frequent returns of these fits of suffocation like asthmatic persons. The said suffocation is ever followed by one symptom which continues till they die, viz. a prodigious rattling in the upper part of the aspera arteria [windpipe] resembling that sound which attends colds when there is phlegm that cannot be got up. It is scarce sensible when they are awake but very great when they are asleep.”
While there is little in this account to suggest the malignant sore-throat, and no mention of a miliary or scarlet rash, yet Rutty made no doubt that it was the malignant angina, comparing it rather to that described by Starr for Cornwall in 1748 than to that of Fothergill’s description. He adds, from some other source of information, that children had generally clammy sweats upon them, with foetor of the breath. Many died in twenty-four hours; none lived above five days. Some had tumours behind the ears, which mortified. Many had a prodigious weeping behind the ears, which was very corrosive. A case is given of a child recovering after a profuse sweat, which suggested diaphoretic treatment by warm baths and sack-whey. Swellings of the tonsils and uvula were not observed.
It will be convenient to give here what remains to be said of the 18th century history of sore-throat in Ireland. In 1744 Rutty enters “mortal anginas” in Dublin. In March, 1751, tumours of the face, jaws, and throat, following an epidemic among horses in December, 1750. In the spring of 1752 “the pestilential angina” made great havoc among children. In the spring of 1755, “the gangrenous sore-throat” (same as in 1743) was fatal to some children. In the winter of 1759-60 he records “scarlet fever,” and a singular form of the same in May, 1762, noticed under Influenza (p. 356). This must serve for the Irish experiences, although it is far from satisfactory. But it should be added that Dr James Sims, of Tyrone, who came to London afterwards and there wrote on the Scarlatina Anginosa (1786), says in an account of his Irish practice: “During all my practice here I have not seen one instance of the malignant ulcerous sore-throat as described by authors” (op. cit. 1773, p. 86).