Most of the poor lived in the old town of Limerick in lofty and closely-built houses which the better classes had abandoned. These dilapidated barracks were the abodes of misery and filth, two and often three families occupying a single room: “It is here, as in the decayed Liberties of Dublin[490], that the indigent room-keeper, the ruined artisan, the unemployed labourer, and the ejected country cottier, with their famishing families retreat.” Their degradation, Dr Geary thought, was owing to the delay of Parliament in giving Ireland the Poor Law. The sanitary state of the old town was disgraceful. Heaps of manure were carefully kept in back yards, to be sold to farmers in the spring—“a very principal source of livelihood” for those who collected it. Certain houses near these depôts had always fever in them, dysentery was frequent, and Exchange-lane never free from it[491]. An extensive glue-mill in the Abbey poisoned the air with the effluvia of putrid animal matters. The following table shows the number of fever-cases admitted to the Hospital or attended from the Dispensary in 1827 and in four ordinary years thereafter:
Limerick:—Table of Hospital Cases of Fever and Cases at their Homes attended from the Dispensary.
| Hospital Cases | Dispensary Cases | |||||||||||||
| Year | Admitted | Died | Average mortality. One in | Attended | Died | Average mortality. One in | Total | |||||||
| 1827 | 2781 | 137 | 20 | 2800 | 80 | 35 | 5581 | |||||||
| 1828 | 854 | 37 | 23 | 960 | 22 | 39 | 1714 | |||||||
| 1829 | 506 | 23 | 22 | 640 | 18 | 35 | 1146 | |||||||
| 1830 | 806 | 34 | 23½ | 910 | 25 | 36 | 1716 | |||||||
| 1831 | 1015 | 65 | 15½ | 920 | 31 | 29 | 1935 | |||||||
| Totals | 5962 | 296 | 20 | 6130 | 176 | 34 | 12092 | |||||||
From 1831 to 1836 the admissions to hospitals were as follows:
| Year | Admitted | Died | ||
| 1832 | 1028 | 57 | ||
| 1833 | 824 | 42 | ||
| 1834 | 906 | 55 | ||
| 1835 | 1484 | 121 | ||
| 1836 | 3227 | 235 |
The last lines show the epidemic increase, which began in the autumn of 1835. It will appear from the following (by Geary) that it was largely an epidemic of young people, and that the fatality was by far the greatest among the comparatively small number of persons attacked at the higher ages—a well-known law of typhus of which this Limerick demonstration was perhaps the first numerically precise:
Table of the Numbers admitted to Limerick Fever Hospital at stated ages of five years, with the deaths, from 6 Jan. 1836 to 6 Jan. 1837.
| Ages in Years | Admitted | Died | Average mortality per cent. | |||
| 1-5 | 81 | 2 | 2¼ | |||
| 5-10 | 489 | 13 | 2½ | |||
| 10-15 | 762 | 18 | 2¼ | |||
| 15-20 | 701 | 37 | 5¼ | |||
| 20-25 | 362 | 22 | 6 | |||
| 25-30 | 304 | 27 | 8¾ | |||
| 30-35 | 100 | 12 | 12 | |||
| 35-40 | 203 | 45 | 23¼ | |||
| 40-45 | 70 | 13 | 18½ | |||
| 45-50 | 82 | 22 | 27 | |||
| 50-55 | 23 | 5 | 21½ | |||
| 55-60 | 36 | 12 | 33¼ | |||
| 60-65 | 2 | 1 | 50 | |||
| 65-70 | 10 | 5 | 50 | |||
| Over 70 | 2 | 1 | 50 | |||
| Total | 3227 | 235 | 7¼ |
One-sixth of these Limerick hospital cases, to the number of 567, came from the county, chiefly from the damp, boggy districts five to sixteen miles from the city. The whole admissions were rather more than the same hospital received in the famine year, 1817. But, although 1836 was not a year of special scarcity, there must have been some cause at work to raise the perennial typhus to the height of an epidemic, not only in Limerick, but in Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Ennis, Belfast, and other towns. In the country, an epidemic outburst during the months of March, April and May, 1836, in the parish of Donoughmore, Donegal, is perhaps only a sample of others unrecorded: it was remarkable in that nine-tenths of the cases of fever had as a sequel large boils on various parts of the body, but principally on the limbs[492].