On famine and fever as cause and effect in Ireland : with observations on hospital location, and the dispensation in outdoor relief of food and medicine / by D.J. Corrigan.

  • Corrigan, Dominic John, 1802-1880.
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On famine and fever as cause and effect in Ireland : with observations on hospital location, and the dispensation in outdoor relief of food and medicine / by D.J. Corrigan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ceded each, and ascertaining if among them there were some one condition invariably present, which, according to the laws of this mode of inquiry, would then be that common cause. It is not my intention in this essay to go into a laboured or obscure discussion on the nature of fever. My object is a practical good. It matters little for the end to be attain- ed, the prevention or removal of fever, whether the cause which shall be proved to be paramount in its production, be, in the language of medicine, a proximate or a remote, a pre- disposing or an exciting cause. Following the above mode of inquiry, I present a table of the most remarkable .Epidemic Fevers of this country of the last hundred years, noting, at the same time in the briefest terms, the circumstances or occurrences that prece- ded or accompanied them. 1728— Spring mild; summer cold and wet, ice in the LifFey 23rd June; autumn and winter variable;* * * § three bad harvests in succession. Provisions at an extravagant price.f 1729— Spring cold and dry ; summer dry ; autumn wet: winter open.J Scarcity of crop; distress continued; housekeepers begging bread in the streets of Dublin.§ * Rutty, pp. 12, 22, 26. f “ Scarcity drove the poor to begin with their potatoes before they were full grown, so that they have lost half the benefit of them. Oatmeal is, at this distance from harvest, in many parts of this kingdom, three times the customary price.”—Boulter's Letters, March, 1727. It may not he amiss to remind the reader, that March, 1727, in Boulter’s Letters, is, according to the present, and to a computation even then not unfrcquently adopted, March, 1828. Boulter, in common with many writers of the day, dated by the civil or legal year, which in England commenced on the 25th of March, which mode of reckoning was in use until the reign of George II. when the same act of Parliament that altered the style, decreed that the year should henceforth commence on the first day of January. The time between the two periods being often marked thus, as February, 1751-52. J Rutty, pp. 12, 22, 26. § Commercial Restraints of Ireland, p. 44.