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.

Year	Dublin, Cork St. Hospital	Dublin House of Industry	Cork Fever Hospitals	Waterford Fever Hospital	Limerick Fever Hospital	Kilkenny Fever 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.

As the spread of contagion came to be realized, the ordinary hospitality to vagrants ceased. Rogan was struck with the apathy which at length arose towards sick or dead relatives; even parents became callous at the death of their children (of whom many died from smallpox). “For some time,” he says, “it has been as difficult for a pauper bearing the symptoms of ill-health to procure shelter for the night, as it was formerly rare to be refused it.” In Strabane they extemporised a poor’s fund by voluntary contributions of £30 a month, by means of which eighty poor families were kept from begging in the streets. In Dublin there was so much alarm of infection from the number of beggars entering the shops that trade was checked. The following, relating to a town in the centre of Ireland, is an extreme instance of the panic which the idea of contagion at length caused:

“In Tullamore, when measures were proposed for arresting the progress of fever, by the establishment of a fever hospital, so little was the alarm that the design was regarded by most of the inhabitants as a well-intentioned project, uncalled for by the circumstances of the community. But when the death of some persons of note excited a sense of danger, alarm commenced, which ended in general dismay: military guards were posted in every avenue leading to this place, for the purpose of intercepting sickly itinerants. The town, from the shops of which the neighbouring country is supplied with articles of all kinds, was thus in a state of blockade. It was apprehended that woollen and cotton goods might be the vehicles of infection, and all intercourse between the shops and purchasers was suspended. Passengers who inadvertently entered the town considered themselves already victims of fever. No person would stop at the public inns, nor hire a carriage for travelling; in a word all communication between the town and the adjacent country was completely interrupted. Apprehension did not proceed in most other places to the same extent as in Tullamore[474].”

Several isolated places escaped the epidemic of typhus, either for a time or altogether. The island of Rathlin, seven miles to the west of Antrim, which was as famished as the mainland, had no typhus at the time when it was epidemic along the nearest shore; the island of Cape Clear, at the southernmost point of Ireland, had a similar experience. The whole county of Wexford, where the soil was dry and the harvest of 1816 had been fair, kept free from typhus until 1818, partly because it was out of the way of vagrants. The town of Dingle, at the head of a bay in Kerry, with old Spanish traditions, was totally free from typhus at a time when its near neighbour, Tralee, was full of it, the immunity being set down to the well-being of the population from their industry at the linen manufacture (and fisheries) and their thrifty habits. But the counties of Wexford and Waterford, and other places more or less exempted in 1817, had a full share of the epidemic in 1818, which was the season of its greatest prevalence in most parts of Ireland except Ulster. The harvest of 1817 had been little better than that of the year before, although the potato crop was hardly a failure. The fine summer of 1818 brought out crowds of vagrants who slept in the open, and, when they took the infection, were placed in “fever-huts” erected near the roads[475]. The harvest of that year was abundant, and by the end of 1818 the epidemic had declined everywhere except in Waterford.

The most carefully kept statistics of the sickness and mortality were those by Rogan for the Strabane Dispensary district, and the adjoining manors of the Marquis of Abercorn, for each of which a private dispensary was established under the care of a physician.

Abstract of Returns of the Dispensary district of Strabane, shewing the numbers ill of fever from the commencement of the epidemic in the summer of 1817, till the end of September, 1818, the numbers labouring under the fever at that date, and the mortality caused by the disease (Rogan, p. 72).

	Population	Ill of Fever	Dead	Remaining ill
Town of Strabane	3896	639	59	13
Parish of Camus	2384	685	61	37
""Leek	5092	1462	96	57
""Urney	4886	1381	86	42
	16,258	4167	302	149

Similar return for those parts of the Marquis of Abercorn’s estates not within the Dispensary district:

Manors	Population	Ill of fever (to Oct. 1818)	Dead
Magevelin and Lismulmughray	5548	1666	101
Donelong	3126	1217	71
Derrygoon	2568	1215	90
Part of Strabane	2796	990	75
Totals	14,038	5088	337

The proportion of attacks in these tables for a part of Tyrone, one-third to one-fourth of the whole population, is believed to have been a fair average for the whole of Ireland. Each attack, with the weakness that it left behind, lasted about six weeks; cases would occur in a family one after another for several months; in some cottages, says Rogan, only the grandmother escaped.

One hundred thousand cases were known to have passed through the hospitals. Harty thought that seven times as many were sick in their cabins or houses, making 800,000 cases in all Ireland in two years; Barker and Cheyne estimated the whole number of cases at a million and a half (1,500,000). The mortality was comparatively small. It comes out greater in the tables for the Strabane district than anywhere else in Ireland except the hospital at Mallow. The following table, compiled by Harty, shows how widely the fatality ranged (if the figures can be trusted), from place to place and from season to season:

Proportions of fatal cases of typhus in the chief hospitals of Ireland 1817, 1818 and 1819 (Harty)[476].

	1817 One in	1818 One in	1819 One in	Average One in
Dublin	14½	24	18¼	20
Kilkenny	16½	14⅚	12⅔	14¼
Dundalk	20⁶⁄7	54	25	30
Belfast	19⅕	15⅘	19	17⅓
Newry	21¹⁄9	34½	13½	26
Cork	29	35	35	33⅕
Limerick	13½	15⅔	30⅔	16½
Waterford	27⅓	25	23⅓	24⅗
Clonmel	27	18	18¼	19⅓
Mallow	22½	9⅗		12
Killarney	74	67	33	62
Tralee	20¾	69	43	39

What this meant to particular places will appear from some instances. In the parish of Ardstraw, Tyrone, with a population of about twenty thousand, 504 coffins are stated by the parish minister to have been given to paupers in eighteen months. The burials were about twice as many as in ordinary years, according to the register of the Cathedral churchyard of Armagh:

1815	247	burials
1816	312	"
1817	571	"
1 May-25 Dec. 1818	463	"

Of the 463 burials in eight months of 1818, there were 165 from fever, 180 from smallpox, and 118 from other causes.

Barker and Cheyne make the whole mortality of the two years from fever and dysentery to have been 65,000; Harty makes it 44,300. But not more than a sixth part of the latter total were registered deaths, and the estimate of the whole may be wide of the mark. In the county of Kerry, ten Catholic priests died of it. Many medical men took it, as well as apothecaries and nurses, and several physicians died, of whom Dr Gillichan, of Dundalk, a young man of good fortune, made a notable sacrifice of his life. Everyone bore willing testimony to the devotion of the Roman Catholic clergy. Some harrowing incidents were reported, such as those from Kanturk, in county Cork:

Dr O’Leary visited a low hut in which lay a father and three children: “There were also two grown-up daughters who were obliged to remain for several nights in the open air, not having room in the hut till the father died, when the stronger of the two girls forced herself into his place. On the road leading to Cork, within a mile of this town, I visited a woman of the name of Vaughan, labouring under typhus; on her left lay a child very ill, at the foot of the bed another child just able to crawl about, and on her right the corpse of a third child, who had died two days previously, and which the unhappy mother could not get removed. When the grant arrived from Government, I visited a man of the name of Brahill near the chapel gate, who with his wife and six children occupied a very small house, all of them ill of fever with the exception of one boy, who was so far convalescent as to creep to the door to receive charity from the passengers.”

Infants rarely took the fever. Dr Osborne, of Cork, stated that in one instance a physician in attendance on the poor had to separate two children from the bed of their dead brother, the father and mother being already in a fever hospital; in another instance, he had to remove an infant from the corpse of its mother who had just expired in a hovel[477].

Nosologically the epidemic of 1817-18 presented several features of interest. It began with dysentery, and ended with the same in autumn, 1818. It was in great part typhus, but towards the end of the epidemic, in Dublin, at Strabane, and doubtless elsewhere, it changed to relapsing fever, that is to say, the sick person “got the cool” about the fifth or seventh day instead of the tenth or twelfth, but was apt to have one or more relapses or recurrences of the fever. The relapsing type was milder in its symptoms and was more rarely fatal. The average fatality of typhus was much less than in ordinary years, while a good many of the fatal cases came from the richer classes, to whom the contagion reached, the proportion of fatalities among them being noted everywhere as very high, up to one death in three or four cases[478]. The fatalities were most common, as usual, at ages from forty to sixty. A full share of the women and children took the fever, perhaps an excess of women, allowing for their excess in the population. The following were the numbers at each period of life among 18,891 cases treated in the hospitals of Dublin and Waterford:

Years of age		1-10		10-20		20-30		30-40		40-50		50 and over
Cases		2426		6116		5230		2476		1415		1228

The action of the English Government was thought by some to have been apathetic. Nothing was done to check the export of corn from Irish ports. Peel, who held the office of Irish Secretary in 1817, was probably actuated in this by the same constitutional and economic considerations which led him, as Prime Minister in 1845, to refuse O’Connell’s demand for a proclamation against the export of corn.

Carleton says that there were scattered over the country “vast numbers of strong farmers with bursting granaries and immense haggards,” and that long lines of provision carts on their way to the ports met or intermingled with the funerals on the roads, the sight of which exasperated the famishing people. Several carts were attacked and pillaged, some “strong farmers” were visited, and here or there a “miser” or meal-monger was obliged to be charitable with a bad grace; but on the whole there was little lawlessness, less indeed than in England in 1756 and 1766, or in Edinburgh in 1741. In September, 1817, Peel commissioned four Dublin physicians to visit the respective provinces and report on the causes and extent of the epidemic fever. On 22 April, 1818, Sir John Newport, member for Waterford, for whom Dr Harty had been collecting information, raised a debate on the epidemic in the House of Commons, and moved for a Select Committee. The debate, after the opening speech and a sensible brief reply by Peel, degenerated at once into irrelevant talk on the inadequacy of the fever hospital of London. The Select Committee was named, and quickly reported on the 8th of May.

A Bill embodying the recommendations of the Committee received the royal assent on 30th May. The Act provided for the extension of fever hospitals, the exemption of lodging-houses, under certain regulations, from the hearth-tax and the window-tax, and the formation of Boards of Health with powers to abate and remove nuisances. The Boards of Health were found unworkable, partly by reason of expense, partly of excessive powers. The epidemic having visited Waterford somewhat late in its progress, Sir John Newport again called attention to it on 6th April, 1819, and moved for the revival of last year’s Committee. Mr Charles Grant, afterwards Lord Glenelg, who was now Irish Secretary, gave much satisfaction to the patriotic members both by his sympathetic speech on the occasion and by his previous action at the Irish Office in the way of pecuniary help to the fever hospitals or Dispensary district officers. The Second Report of the Committee remarked that the rich absentee landlords had given nothing. Another Act, of June, 1819 (59 Geo. III. cap 41), defined the duties of officers of health, and contained an important clause (ix.) relating to the spread of contagion by vagrants. By that time the epidemic was over; nor can it be said that the action of the Government from first to last had made much difference to its progress.

Vagrancy was the principal direct cause; and behind the vagrancy were usages and traditions, with interests centuries old, which made the landlords resolute not to pay poor-rates on their rentals. It was not until twenty years after that the English Poor Law was applied to Ireland (in 1839), whereby the pauper class were dealt with as far as possible in their respective parishes. How far that measure was effective in checking the spread of contagion will appear when we come to the great famine and epidemic of dysentery and fever in 1846-49.

It will not be necessary to follow with equal minuteness the successive famines and epidemics of typhus, relapsing fever and dysentery in Ireland, to the great famine of 1846-49. After 1817 distress became chronic among the cottiers and small farmers. Leases had been entered into at high rents during the years of war prices, and in the struggle for holdings tenants at will offered the highest rate. When peace came and prices fell, rents were found to be excessive, not to say impossible. But in Ireland with a rapidly increasing population it was easier to put the rents up than to bring them down. Other things helped to embarrass the poor cottager: he paid twice over for his religion, tithes to the parson, dues to the priest; and he paid all the more of the tithe in that the graziers, who were mostly of the established Church and the occupiers of the fertile plains, had taken care to make potato land titheable (at what date this innovation arose is not stated) but had used their power in the Irish Parliament to resist the tithe on arable pastures. Again the cottiers or cottagers paid, in effect, the whole of the poor rate in the form of alms; for the dogs of the gentry kept all beggars from their gates.