Even in the crowded workhouses and gaols, more deaths occurred from dysentery than from fever. But in some of the gaols great epidemics arose which cut off many of the poor by malignant infection. That was an old experience of the gaols, studied best in England in the 18th century; the worst fevers, or those most rapidly fatal, were caught by the prisoners newly brought to mix with others long habituated to their miserable condition. The gaols in Ireland during the famine were crowded to excess, not so much because the people gave way to lawlessness—their patience and obedience were matters of common complimentary remark—but because they committed petty thefts, broke windows, or the like, in order to obtain the shelter and rations of prisoners. The mortality in the gaols rose and fell as follows[520]:
| Year | Deaths in gaol | |
| 1846 | 130 | |
| 1847 | 1320 | |
| 1848 | 1292 | |
| 1849 | 1406 | |
| 1850 | 692 | |
| 1851 | 197 |
Most of the deaths in these larger totals came from two or three great prison epidemics in each of the series of years—at Tralee, Carrick-on-Shannon, Castlebar and Cork in 1847, at Galway in 1848, at Clonmel, Limerick, Cork and Galway in 1849, the highest mortality being 485 deaths in Galway county gaol in 1848. Descriptions remain of the state of the gaols at Tralee and Castlebar in 1847, from which it appears that they were frightfully overcrowded and filthy. Dr Dillon, of Castlebar, says that the county gaol there in March, 1847, had twice as many prisoners as it was built for, “those committed being in a state of nudity, filth and starvation.” He expected an outbreak of typhus, and applied to the magistrates to increase the accommodation, which they declined to do. In due time, very bad maculated typhus broke out, of which the chaplain, matron and others of the staff died. This contagious fever is said to have proved fatal to forty per cent. of those attacked by it. The deaths for the year are returned at 83 in Castlebar gaol, those in Tralee gaol at 101, and in the gaol of Carrick-on-Shannon at 100.
No exact statistical details of the mortality in the great Irish famine of 1846-49 were kept. Ireland had then no systematic registration of deaths and of the causes of death, such as had existed in England since 1837. Information as to the mortality was got retrospectively once in ten years by means of the census, heads of families being required to fill in all the deaths, with causes, ages, years, seasons, &c., of the same, that had occurred in their families within the previous decennial period. This was, of course, a very untrustworthy method, more especially so for the famine years, when many thousands of families emigrated, leaving hardly a trace behind, many hamlets were wholly abandoned, and many parishes stripped of nearly half their inhabited houses. When a certain day in the year 1851 came round for the census papers to be filled up, a fourth part of the people were gone, and that fourth could have told more about the famine and the deaths than an equal number of those that remained. However, the Census Commissioners did their best with the defective, loose or erroneous data at their service. Much of the interest of the Irish Census of 1851 centered, indeed, in the Great Famine; and the two volumes of specially medical information compiled by Sir William Wilde, making Part V. of the Census Report, are a store of facts, statistical and historical, of which only a few can be given here[521].
Table of Workhouses and Auxiliary Workhouses in Ireland during the Famine.
| Year | No. of Workhouses | Numbers relieved | Numbers that died | Ratio of deaths One in | ||||
| 1846 | 129 | 250,822 | 14,662 | 17·11 | ||||
| 1847 | 130 | 332,140 | 66,890 | 6·92 | ||||
| 1848 | 131 | 610,463 | 45,482 | 13·4 | ||||
| 1849 | 131 | 932,284 | 64,440 | 14·47 | ||||
| 1850 | 163 | 805,702 | 46,721 | 17·74 |
During the ten years from 6 June, 1841, to 30 March, 1851, the deaths from the principal infective or “zymotic” diseases in the workhouses were as follows:
| Dysentery | 50,019 | |
| Diarrhoea | 20,507 | |
| Fevers | 34,644 | |
| Measles | 8,943 | |
| Cholera | 6,716 | |
| Smallpox | 5,016 |
Besides the workhouses, there were during the famine 227 temporary fever hospitals, which received 450,807 persons from the beginning of 1847 to the end of 1850, of whom 47,302 died.