cted during the epidemic, of any
similar class of institution in Ireland--as many as fifty persons a week
having died at one period subsequent to this--and, for a long time, all
attempt at separate burial was found impossible. In the County Galway
the epidemic of both dysentery and fever appeared at Ahascragh and
Clifden, separate ends of the district, at the end of this year."[269]

As was anticipated, fever rose to a fearful height in 1847. And, say the
Commissioners of Health, "the state of the medical institutions of
Ireland was, unfortunately, such as peculiarly unfitted them to afford
the required medical aid, on the breaking out of the epidemic. The
county infirmaries had not provision for the accommodation of fever
patients. The county fever hospitals were destitute of sufficient funds;
and dispensaries, established for the purpose of affording only ordinary
out-door medical relief, could, of course, afford no efficient
attendance on the numbers of destitute persons, suffering from acute
contagious diseases in their own miserable abodes, often scattered over
districts several miles in extent."

In January, fever complicated with dysentery and small pox became very
rife in Belfast, and accounts from various other places soon showed,
that it had seized upon the whole country. The week ending the 3rd of
April, the total number of inmates in Irish Workhouses was 104,455, of
whom 9,000 were fever patients. The deaths in that week were 2,706, and
the average of deaths in each week during the month was twenty-five per
thousand of the entire inmates--a death rate which would have hurried
to the grave, every man, woman, and child in the Workhouses of Ireland,
in about nine months! but it gradually decreased, until in October it
stood at five per thousand in the week.

On the 19th we read that, "the number suffering from fever in Swinford
is beyond calculation." Some idea of the dreadful mortality now
prevalent in Cork, may be found from the fact, that in one day
thirty-six bodies were interred in the same grave; the deaths in the
Workhouse there from the 27th of December, 1846, until the middle of
April--less than four months--amounted to 2,130. At this period, dropsy,
the result of starvation, became almost universal. On the 16th of April,
there were upwards of three hundred cases of fever in the
Carrick-on-Shannon Workhouse, and the weekly deaths amounted to fifty.
Again: every avenue leading to the plague-stricken t