Several isolated places escaped the epidemic of typhus, either for a time or altogether. The island of Rathlin, seven miles to the west of Antrim, which was as famished as the mainland, had no typhus at the time when it was epidemic along the nearest shore; the island of Cape Clear, at the southernmost point of Ireland, had a similar experience. The whole county of Wexford, where the soil was dry and the harvest of 1816 had been fair, kept free from typhus until 1818, partly because it was out of the way of vagrants. The town of Dingle, at the head of a bay in Kerry, with old Spanish traditions, was totally free from typhus at a time when its near neighbour, Tralee, was full of it, the immunity being set down to the well-being of the population from their industry at the linen manufacture (and fisheries) and their thrifty habits. But the counties of Wexford and Waterford, and other places more or less exempted in 1817, had a full share of the epidemic in 1818, which was the season of its greatest prevalence in most parts of Ireland except Ulster. The harvest of 1817 had been little better than that of the year before, although the potato crop was hardly a failure. The fine summer of 1818 brought out crowds of vagrants who slept in the open, and, when they took the infection, were placed in “fever-huts” erected near the roads[475]. The harvest of that year was abundant, and by the end of 1818 the epidemic had declined everywhere except in Waterford. The most carefully kept statistics of the sickness and mortality were those by Rogan for the Strabane Dispensary district, and the adjoining manors of the Marquis of Abercorn, for each of which a private dispensary was established under the care of a physician. Abstract of Returns of the Dispensary district of Strabane, shewing the numbers ill of fever from the commencement of the epidemic in the summer of 1817, till the end of September, 1818, the numbers labouring under the fever at that date, and the mortality caused by the disease (Rogan, p. 72). Population Ill of Fever Dead Remaining ill Town of Strabane 3896 639 59 13 Parish of Camus 2384 685 61 37 " " Leek 5092 1462 96 57 " " Urney 4886 1381 86 42 --------------------------------------------- 16,258 4167 302 149 Similar return for those parts of the Marquis of Abercorn’s estates not within the Dispensary district: Ill of fever Manors Population (to Oct. 1818) Dead