1846 November 93 " December 224 1847 June 757 1848 February 210 " May 705 " November 400 The almost uniform report of medical men was that the epidemic of fever began in 1847, in the spring months in most places, in the summer in others. Relapsing fever was the common type. It was usually called the famine fever for the reason that it was constantly seen to arise in persons “recovering from famine,” on receiving food from the Relief Committees[513]. It was a mild or “short” fever, apt to leave weakness, but rarely fatal. Dr Dillon, of Castlebar, reports that he would be told by the head of a family: “We have been _three times down_ in the fever, and have all, thank God, got through it.” Dr Starkey, of Newry, “knew many families, living in wretched poverty on the mountains near the town, who were attacked with fever, and who without any medical attendance, and but little attendance of any kind, passed through the fever without a single death.” The doctor of Bryansford and Castlewellan, county Down, (where there was no famine), declared that the recoveries of the poor in their own cottages destitute of almost every comfort, were astonishing. In the Skibbereen district, Dr Lamprey was “often struck with the rarity of the ordinary types of fever among the thousands suffering from starvation.” In some of the most famine-stricken places, such as the islands off the coast of Mayo and Galway, and in Gweedore, Donegal, not more than one in a hundred cases of relapsing fever proved fatal. In Limerick the mortality was “very small.” In many places it is given at three in the hundred cases, in some places as high as six in the hundred. When deaths occurred, they were often sudden and unexpected,--more probable in the relapse than in the first onset. At Clonmel it was remarked that a certain blueness of the nose presaged death; in Fermanagh it was called the Black Fever, from the duskiness of the face. The report from Ballinrobe, Mayo, says that it was attended by rheumatic pains, which caused the patients to cry out when they stirred in bed[514]. It was mostly a fever of the first half of life, and more of the female sex than of the male. One says that it was commonest from five to fifteen years of age, another from ten to thirty years.