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.