ompensated for partial
want was absent. This description applies to the two
years of 1816 and 1817. In midsummer of 1817, the blaze
of fever was over the entire country. It had burst
forth in almost a thousand different points. Within the
short space of a month, in the summer of 1817, the
epidemic sprung forth in Tramore, Youghal, Kinsale,
Tralee, and Clonmel, in Carrick-on-Suir, Iloscrea,
Ballina, Castlebar, Belfast, Armagh, Omagh,
Londonderry, Monasterevan, Tullamore and Slane. This
simultaneous break-out shows that there must have been
some universal cause."

Again:

"The poor were deprived of employment and were driven
from the doors where before they had always received
relief, lest they should introduce disease with them.
Thus, destitution and fever continued in a vicious
circle, each impelling the other, while want of
presence of mind aggravated a thousandfold the terrible
infliction. Of the miseries that attend a visitation of
epidemic fever, few can form a conception. The mere
relation of the scenes that occurred in the country,
even in one of its last visitations, makes one shudder
in reading them. As Barker and Cheyne observe in their
report, 'a volume might be filled with instances of the
distress occasioned by the visitation of fever in
1817.'"

"'On the road leading from Cork, within a mile of the
town (Kanturk), I visited a woman laboring under
typhus; on her left lay a child very ill, at the foot
of the bed another child just able to crawl about, and
on her right the corpse of a third child who had died
two days previously, which the unhappy mother could not
get removed.'--Letter from Dr. O'Leary, Kanturk.

"'Ellen Pagan, a young woman, whose husband was
obliged, in order to seek employment, to leave her
almost destitute in a miserable cabin, with three
children, gave the shelter of her roof to a poor beggar
who had fever. She herself caught the disease, and from
the terror created in the neighborhood, was, with her
three children, deserted--except that some person left
a little water and milk at the window for the
children,--one about four, the other about three years
old, and the other an infant at her breast. In this way
she continued for a week, when a neighbor sent her a