Although this was the same fever as prevailed in 1817-19, even local bleeding was rarely resorted to, and many of the cases were thought to demand stimulants. All accounts agree in stating that the epidemic supervened upon a period of great distress among the Scottish poor, and that it was restricted throughout to the poorest and most wretched of the population.” This epidemic, which was the subject of an altogether unusual amount of writing in Edinburgh[388], partly on the supposition that relapsing fever was a “new disease,” proved once for all that one had not to go to Ireland for the engendering or making of a famine-fever. The demonstration came just in time; for the epidemic was hardly over in Scotland, when the series of great potato-famines in Ireland began in 1845, soon to be followed by the disastrous epidemics of dysentery, relapsing fever and typhus from 1846 to 1848. Indeed, so near was the Scots epidemic to the Irish, that in the North of Ireland the first of the relapsing fever, in 1846, was called “the Scotch Fever,” on the supposition that it had reached them from its recent focus in the West of Scotland[389]. The Irish and original part of the great epidemic of 1846-48 has been fully described in another chapter; much of the mortality was due to dysentery, and the most prevalent fever was relapsing fever, with a very low rate of fatality among the poorer classes. But in Ireland itself there was also much typhus, very mortal to the richer classes who came in contact with the starving multitudes. The “Irish Fever” of 1847 in England and Scotland. The contagion that reached England and Scotland from the scene of famine in Ireland was more apt to produce typhus than relapsing fever. That the Irish contagion was the principal source of the great epidemics in England and Scotland in 1847-48, seems to be proved by every fact in their progress, direction and other circumstances. But it is not so clear that England and Scotland would not have had an unusual amount of typhus in the same years even if the Irish had been kept out by an ideally strict quarantine. What touched Ireland most, touched Scotland and England in a measure. The seasons were bad in all parts of the kingdom; many were out of work in the manufacturing towns; but as soon as the price of provisions fell in 1848, the epidemic in England came to a sudden end. The epidemic of fever in England in 1847 was almost wholly typhus; in Scotland, it was to some extent relapsing fever, but there also it was mainly typhus. It was more severe, while it lasted, than the epidemic of 1837 and following years; but it was of shorter duration, ceasing almost abruptly in 1848. The rise of the epidemic of 1847 in London is shown by the following quarterly returns of the deaths from fever: 1st Quarter 2nd Quarter 3rd Quarter 4th Quarter 442 568 895 1279