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 |