We come at length to the purely medical side of the great famine of 1846-47[505]. The distress in the latter part of the year 1846 was felt first in the west and south-west--in the districts to which the famine of 1822 had been almost confined. It happened that the state of matters around Skibbereen, the extreme south-western point of Ireland, was brought most under public notice; but it is believed that there were parts of the western sea-board counties of Mayo, Galway, Clare and Kerry from which equally terrible scenes might have been reported at an equally early period. It was in Clare that relief at the national charges was longest needed. Dr Popham, one of the visiting physicians to the Cork Workhouse, wrote as follows: “The pressure from without upon the city began to be felt in October [1846], and in November and December the influx of paupers from all parts of this vast county was so overwhelming that, to prevent them from dying in the streets, the doors of the workhouse were thrown open, and in one week 500 persons were admitted, without any provision, either of space or clothing, to meet so fearful an emergency. All these were suffering from famine, and most of them from malignant dysentery or fever. The fever was in the first instance undoubtedly confined to persons badly fed or crowded into unwholesome habitations; and as it originated with the vast migratory hordes of labourers and their families congregated upon the public roads, it was commonly termed ‘the road fever’[506].” It was the same in the smaller towns of the county, such as Skibbereen; in the month of December, 1846, there were one hundred and forty deaths in the workhouse; on one day there were fifteen funerals waiting their turn for the religious offices. Still farther afield, in the country parishes, the state of matters was the same. The sea-board parish of Skull was a typical poor district, populous with cabins along the numerous bays of the Atlantic, but with few residential seats of the gentry. On the 2nd of February, 1847, the parish clergyman, the Rev. Traill Hall (himself at length a victim to the contagion), wrote as follows: “Frightful and fearful is the havock around me. Our medical friend, Dr Sweetman, a gentleman of unimpeachable veracity, informed me yesterday that if he stated the mortality of my parish at an average of thirty-five daily, he would be within the truth. The children in particular, he remarked, were disappearing with awful rapidity. And to this I may add the aged, who, with the young--neglected, perhaps, amidst the widespread destitution--are almost without exception swollen and ripening for the grave[507].”