98 TYPHUS FEVER 



to feed itself, even in these years of the potato blight, most of this had 

 to be sent to England to pay the rents. Years before both Malthus 

 and Cobbett had protested against a people trying to live so largely 

 on potatoes. The former wrote as follows: 



When the common people of a country live principally on the dearest grain, 

 as they do in England, on wheat, they leave great resources in scarcity; and 

 barley, oats, rye and cheap soup and potatoes all present themselves as less 

 expensive, yet at the same time wholesome means of nourishment, but when 

 their habitual food is the lowest in the scale, they appear to be wholly without 

 resource except in the bark of trees like the poor Swedes ; and a great portion 

 of them must necessarily be starved. 



After this famine the Irish ceased to rely so largely on the potato, 

 emigration to this country and Canada greatly increased, and "the 

 population has steadily declined and the well being of the people 

 steadily improved." 



Before dismissing the subject of Irish typhus epidemics, I wish to 

 add a quotation from Creighton, showing that the case mortality in 

 this disease is higher among the robust and well fed than among the 

 weak and hungry. "There appeared to be a scale of malignity in the 

 fevers in an inverted order of the degree of misery. The most 

 wretched had the mildest fever, the artisan class or cottagers had 

 typhus fatal in the usual proportion, the classes living in comfort had 

 typhus of a very fatal kind. This experience, however strange it may 

 seem, was reported by medical observers everywhere with remarkable 

 unanimity. One says that six or seven of the rich died in every ten, 

 others say one in three. Forty-eight medical men died in 1847 in 

 Munster, most of them from fever; in Cavan County seven medical 

 men died from fever in twelve months and three more had a narrow 

 escape of death; two of the three physicians sent by the Board of 

 Health to the coast of Connemara died of fever. Many Catholic 

 priests died as well as some of the established Church Clergy; and 

 there were numerous fatalities of the resident gentry and among others 

 who administered the relief. Yet a case of fever in a good home did 

 not become a focus of contagion ; the contagion came from direct con- 

 tact with the crowds of starving poor, their clothes ragged and filthy, 

 their bodies unwashed, and many of them suffering from dysentery. 



