ABSTRACT
THE epidemic Fever did not prevail in all parts of the province of Leinster with equal severity, or to the same extent. The numbers affected with fever were comparatively few, and the disease was unusually mild in some parts of Westmeath, particularly around Mullingar,* but there were parts even of this county, in which the disease must have produced great havoc. We learn from Mr. Reed of Killucan, that, in the latter part of 1817, and beginning of 1818, he discovered that in fully one out of every three houses he visited, some of the family had previously died, without being seen by any medical practitioner. In the northern and western parts of the King’s County,† Wexford,‡ and in chat part of the county of Wicklow, which forms the sea coast, fever was infrequent and mild. In Leinster the country people generally suffered more than those who were resident in the towns: For example, the inhabitants of Arklow and 491Wicklow, Tullow and Newtownbarry, as we learn from Dr. Johnstone of Arklow, Drs. Smith and Goodison of Wicklow, and Dr. Robinson of Newtownbarry, suffered but little. Dr. Smith affirmed that the epidemic never reached Wicklow; and Dr. Goodison, that it never arrived at the same alarming height there that it did in other places. In Arklow the upper ranks escaped, and the mildness of the disease among the poor may be inferred from the returns of the fever hospital, in which, although the treatment was judicious, the accommodation was but indifferent. Of 274 persons admitted, between the months of January 1818 and July 1819 into the fever hospital at Arklow, only one patient died. Such was the case in the towns; whereas in the mountainous districts around Ratbdrum, Hacketstown, and Carnew, the case was very different indeed. We learn from Mr. Clarke, late Surgeon to the 21st Fuziliers, now practising at Rathdrum, that one-half of the population suffered from fever while it was epidemic in that; neighbourhood, and of those who were not removed from their own houses into the hospital, eight or ten died out of every hundred patients.
