Relapsing fever was the most common fever of the famine years, in the cabins, workhouses and fever hospitals, in the country districts as well as the towns and cities. Dr Henry Kennedy says of Dublin: “Cases of genuine typhus were through the whole epidemic very rare, I mean comparatively speaking.” But everywhere there was a certain admixture of typhus, and in some not unusual circumstances the typhus was peculiarly malignant or fatal--many times more fatal than the relapsing fever. The poor themselves do not appear to have suffered much from the more malignant typhus, unless in the gaols and workhouses. When the doors of the Cork workhouse were thrown open in December, 1846, five hundred were admitted pell mell in one week; the deaths in that workhouse were 757 in the month of March, 1847, and 3329 in the whole year. In the Ballinrobe workhouse, county Mayo, “men, women and children were huddled together in the same rooms (the probationary wards), eating, drinking, cooking, and sleeping in the same apartment in their clothes, without even straw to lie on or a blanket to cover them.” Typhus at length appeared in that workhouse, said to have been brought in by a strolling beggar, and the physician, the master and the clerk died of it. Wherever the better-off classes caught fever, it was not relapsing but typhus, and a very fatal typhus. At Skibbereen the relapsing fever “was not propagated by contagion; but in persons so affected, when brought in contact with the more wealthy and better fed individuals, was capable of imparting fevers of different types[515].” There were many opportunities for such contact-in serving out food at the depôts, in superintending the gangs working on the roads, in attending the sessions, in visiting the sick. The crowds suffering from starvation, famine-fever or dysentery exhaled the most offensive smells, the smell of the relapsing fever and the anasarca being peculiar or distinguishable[516]. There appeared to be a scale of malignity in the fevers in an inverted order of the degree of misery. The most wretched had the mildest fever, the artizan class or cottagers had typhus fatal in the usual proportion, the classes living in comfort had typhus of a very fatal kind. This experience, however strange it may seem, was reported by medical observers everywhere with remarkable unanimity. One says that six or seven of the rich died in every ten attacks, others say one in three. Forty-eight medical men died in 1847 in Munster, most of them from fever; in Cavan county, seven medical men died of fever in twelve months, and three more had a narrow escape of death: two of the three physicians sent by the Board of Health to the coast of Connemara died of fever[517]. Many Catholic priests died as well as some of the Established Church clergy; and there were numerous fatalities in the families of the resident gentry, and among others who administered the relief. Yet a case of fever in a good house did not become a focus of