Disease and fever

Typhus fever was rampant throughout the Famine years, along with an array of other diseases, illnesses and medical conditions associated with the scarcity of food, lack of vitamins, weakness, the cold and wet, proximity to other infected beings and the failure to bury victims rapidly.

Typhus, transmitted by lice, affected the blood circulation, swelled and blackened its victim's face. Temperature would rise, delirium would set in, a rash broke out followed then by vomiting and often gangrene. The Black Fever as it was known, was immediately identifiable from the ``an almost intolerable stench''. Often Yellow Fever - jaundice - followed.

Ordinary dysentery was common in those years, killing thousands. Scurvy and like illnesses were widespread, and often fatal. Conditions were perfect for the spread of all contagious diseases. Clothing was sold for food, leaving the poor in filthy, lice-infested rags. The hovels were damp and cold, the occupants being too weak to dig turf or having sold their winter fuel for a few morsels of food.

Widespread though not infectious, was `Famine dropsy' (hunger oedema) ``that horrid disease in which first the limbs, and then the whole body, swell most frightfully and finally burst''.

The eye infection, ophthalmia spread like wildfire in the cramped conditions of the workhouses or the coffin ships, resulting in thousands losing their sight.

The cities were also centres of fever as the The Freeman's Journal 27 July 1847 stated:

``While fever patients pine, writhe and perish, among the close, pestilential atmosphere of crowded lanes and alleys, speaking the disease, and dragging all who come in contact with them down to share their untimely graves.''

By Aengus O Snodaigh