The strangest thing in this epidemic was the sequel of it. In the spring of 1827, intermittent fever, which had not made its appearance for several years in Dublin, began to prevail pretty generally; whilst the ordinary continued fever showed a strong tendency to assume the intermittent and remittent forms. It is not surprising, therefore, that Dr O’Brien, who had these varied experiences of epidemic dysentery in 1825, of epidemic relapsing fever and typhus in 1826, and of intermittent fever in 1827, should adopt Sydenham’s language of epidemic constitutions, and revert to the old Sydenhamian doctrine of causes. While the sequence of epidemic diseases in Dublin was some dysentery in the autumn and winter of 1825 and relapsing fever on a vast scale during the excessively dry spring and summer of 1826, in country districts of Ireland, such as Skibbereen, dysentery became epidemic after the great drought and heat of 1826, while “fever disappeared altogether,” and indeed all other prevalent forms of sickness gave way before it, so general was it. Such is the report from Skibbereen, county Cork, a district that became early notorious, in the great famine of 1846-47, and was perhaps a kind of barometer of Irish distress twenty years earlier. The epidemic dysentery of 1826 attacked all classes there, but chiefly the poorest; it was apt to begin insidiously, and, as it was often neglected, so it often became obstinate and hard to cure. Dr McCarthy attributed it to the drought of 1826, the commercial distress of 1825, the lack of employment for labourers, the overgrowth of population, and the alarming rise in the prices of food[486]. He uses the same economic illustrations as O’Connell and Smith O’Brien in the Great Famine twenty years after, which were, indeed, as old as the time of Bishop Berkeley[487]. Although little is heard of the fever of 1826-27 except in Dublin, it is probable that the same causes which produced it there were operative in other large towns. The admissions to the Limerick Fever Hospital rose rapidly in the end of 1826. Geary, who was appointed one of its physicians that year, estimates that about one in twelve of the population of Limerick (63,310) were treated for fever in 1827 at public institutions, besides those treated in private practice. It was relapsing fever, as in Dublin[488]. Perennial Distress and Fever.