prevalent at Middleton, County Cork; and, near Bantry Abbey, 900 bodies were interred in a plot of ground forty feet square.”  From the autumn of 1846 to May, 1847, ten thousand persons were interred in Father Mathew’s cemetery at Cork—­he was obliged to close it.  On the 12th of June, the number of fever patients in the hospitals of Belfast was 1,840.  “Awful fever,” “Fearful increase of fever,” were the ordinary phrases, in which the spread of the disease was announced from every part of Ireland.[270]

“Of the extent of the epidemic in Dublin, it would not be easy to give any very correct idea.  The hospital accommodation of the city amounted to about 2,500 beds, a greater amount by 1,000, I believe, than were opened in any previous epidemic.  It may give some idea of the vast amount of sickness, to state, that, at the Cork Street hospital, nearly 12,000 cases applied during a period of about ten months.  At one period there were upwards of 400 outstanding tickets; and as many as eighty applications for admission have been made in one day.  Still it may be safely stated, that all this would give a very imperfect idea of the real amount; for all who had to go amongst the poor at their own houses, were well aware, that vast numbers remained there, who either could not be accommodated in hospital, or who never thought of applying.  It was quite common to find three, four, and even five ill in a house, where application had been made but for one.  I think the very lowest estimate which could be arrived at cannot make the numbers who sickened in Dublin short of 40,000.  The greatest pressure on the hospital took place in the month of June, from which time the fever gradually declined, till the month of February, 1848, when the epidemic may be said to have ceased."[271]

In February, 1847, fourteen applications were made to the Board of Health, for providing temporary hospital accommodation; in March, they received fifty-one such applications; in April, fifty-three, in May, fifty-two; in June, twenty-two; in July, sixty; in August, forty-eight; in September the number was ten, and in October only eight.  The applications to the Board of Health for temporary fever hospitals in 1847 were 343; the entire number of such applications up to 1850, when the Board closed its labours, were 576, of which 203 were refused.

Relapse was a remarkable feature of this famine-fever.  “Relapses were so common,” writes Dr. Freke from a western county, “as to appear characteristic of the epidemic; in several cases they have occurred so frequently as three, or even four times in the same individual.”  At Nohaval, Kinsale Union, out of 250 cases 240 relapsed.