[514] Pains resembling those of rheumatism were common in the fever of 1817-18 at Limerick. Barker and Cheyne, I. 432.
[515] Lamprey, u. s.
[516] Dr Kelly of Mullingar compared the smell of relapsing fever to that of burning musty straw. Dub. Quart. Journ. Med., Aug. 1863, p. 341.
[517] Cusack and Stokes, ibid. IV. 134.
[518] Barker and Cheyne, Harty, and Rogan have been cited to this effect for earlier epidemics. Graves (Clin. Med. pp. 59-60) says: “In the epidemics of 1816, 1817, 1818 and 1819, it was found by accurate computation that the rate of mortality was much higher among the rich than among the poor. This was a startling fact, and a thousand different explanations of it were given at the time.” He cites Fletcher (Pathology, p. 27) an Edinburgh observer, as follows: “The rich are less frequently affected with epidemic fevers than the poor, but more frequently die of them. Good fare keeps off diseases, but increases their mortality when they take place.”
[519] Dub. Quart. Journ. Med. Sc. N. S. VII. 388.
[520] Census of Ireland, 1851.
[521] The Census of Ireland of 1851. Part V. Table of Deaths. 2 vols. Dublin, 1856. Upwards of two hundred pages are occupied with a chronological “Table of Cosmical Phenomena, Epizootics, Epiphitics, Famines and Pestilences in Ireland” from the earliest times. This retrospect, which is very replete but tedious and uncritical, is followed by a summary report of twenty pages on “The Last General Potato Failure, and the Great Famine and Pestilence of 1845-50,” and by a long series of tabulated extracts from contemporary writings on all matters relating to the famine.
[522] Of this total, 18,430 deaths were from dysentery and 7,264 from diarrhoea.
[523] The increase in 1849 was doubtless owing to choleraic diarrhoea during the epidemic of Asiatic cholera, the deaths from dysentery being one-half of the total.