Famine Fevers in England and Ireland *

After the generalized famine fevers had come to an end in England they continued to scourge Ireland for centuries, where their course may be taken as a repetition of the happenings in England in earlier times. During the eighteenth century and part of the nineteenth, large numbers of the Irish peasantry. lived in a deplorable state of poverty; lacking reserves, one or two bad seasons might suffice to cause a widespread famine. Such national calamities befell, for instance, in the vears beginning I739, i8oo, i8i6 and I846. With each famine there came a dreadful epidemic of fever, which broke out with such regularity that its advent was confidently predicted when the famine began. Corrigan, of ' Corrigan's pulse,' popularized the saying ' No famine, no fever'; here ' fever' signified not some scattered cases, or localized outbreaks-these were evervday affairs-but a great and rising tide of pestilence. These epidemics were typhus, with some varying admixture of relapsing fever, the latter disease usually being most in evidence at the beginning and at the