The Cholera of 1853-54 in Scotland and Ireland.
The cholera of 1853-54 in Scotland has not been so fully recorded as either of the two preceding epidemics. It is said to have caused about six thousand deaths, of which 3892 were in Glasgow alone, and a considerable part of the remainder in Edinburgh and Dundee. The infection began to appear in the end of September, having been derived probably from the dreadful explosion at Newcastle. A few early cases occurred at Dunse, in Berwickshire. On the 16th September, 1853, the old Cholera Hospital at Edinburgh, in Surgeons’ Square, was opened, but received only 45 cases until the beginning of June, 1854, when it was closed. In the autumn of 1854 the real epidemic began, the hospital being re-opened on 24th August, from which date until the 30th November the admissions were 198. These hospital figures indicate for Edinburgh a milder epidemic than that of the winter of 1848, which was itself milder than that of 1832. The cases came mostly from the very same localities of the old town as in 1848. There were 145 females to 97 males; the deaths were 117 in 243 cases admitted[1572].
The epidemic at Dundee was a late autumnal or winter one, in the end of 1853, and of great severity, the mortality having probably exceeded 500. The Glasgow epidemic had a course very nearly parallel to that of 1832, and quite unlike the extraordinary winter explosion of 1848-9. It began, indeed, in winter—about the 15th of December, 1853, and had caused 849 deaths to the 27th of February; there was a sharp rise of the mortality from the 13th to the 24th of March, the total deaths to that date being 1306. As in 1832, the infection appeared to die out in the late spring and early summer; but in June it revived and increased in virulence until August, after which it subsided gradually until November, the whole mortality having been 3892, or ·98 per cent. of the population, nearly the same ratio as in 1848-9, (1·06) and a lower ratio than in 1832 (1·4). The first part of the epidemic fell chiefly on the north and east of the city, the second part, in summer and autumn, was all over the city, as in 1832, and among all classes, as in the winter of 1848-49, but perhaps less disastrously in the best quarters of the city than the last had been. The cholera hospital received a comparatively small part of all the cases—600 of cholera, 253 of diarrhoea, the deaths being 306, or less than a tenth part of the whole mortality[1573].
It is probable that the mortalities in Scotland on this occasion, besides those in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, were neither so general nor so great as in 1832. One remarkable outbreak happened at the village of Symington, in Ayrshire: in a population of 240 there were 110 attacks and 30 deaths; nearly all the cases were in houses on one side of the village street, which got their water from a public well; the houses on the other side, having private wells (and differing, doubtless, in other respects), were notably free from the infection[1574].
The cholera of 1854 was unimportant in Ireland. Cases appeared among emigrants on board ships in Belfast Lough and at Queenstown in the end of 1853, but no diffusion took place until 1854, and then only to a moderate extent. It is supposed that some 1706 persons died of it in Ireland in that year, according to the retrospective figures of the census of 1861; but a good many deaths from “cholera” were returned for every year of the decennium, so that it is improbable that the whole 1706 in 1854 were of the true Asiatic type. Ulster had 895 of these, Leinster 453, Munster 324, and the whole of Connaught only 34[1575].