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.