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.”