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: