Until well into the 20th century, life in Ireland, like most of the world, was very much a lottery. Infectious diseases were rife, exacerbated by poor housing and almost non-existent sanitation. Many diseases were poorly understood, and the cures were often as bad as the affliction – syphilis was commonly treated with highly poisonous mercury. Many diseases had no cure and catching them was often a death sentence. Louis Pasteur did not come up with his germ theory of disease until the early 1860s, vaccination for anything other than smallpox was rare until the 20th century, and antibiotics were unknown. Mass production of Alexander Fleming’s 1928 discovery, penicillin, only began during and after the second world war.
In the 1800s, the newspapers were full of adverts for miraculous cures. For example, an 1854 advert for Parr’s Life Pills claimed that they were:
“… especially efficacious in all the variety of ailments incidental to the fair sex. Ladies, even of the most delicate constitutions, will find them particularly beneficial, before and after confinement; and for general use in schools they cannot be too highly recommended. They mildly and speedily remove all Skin Eruptions, Sallowness of Complexion, Nervous Irritability, Sick Headache, Depression of Spirits, Irregularity, or general Derangement of the System.
Very impressive, given that today we would probably need at least a dozen different medicines, several ointments, plus some psychotherapy, to treat that lot – and we still don’t have a cure for ‘general derangement of the system’.
Cholera
We know that there were often major outbreaks of highly contagious diseases, but there are surprisingly few references to them in contemporary newspapers. They appear to have been seen as just part of life. Where they are mentioned, it is often just in passing, for example this report of a local death from cholera in 1833:
“Nov. 11, at Pointzpass, Mr. James McConnell, of Tanderagee, in the county of Armagh. This awful disease, with which it has pleased Divine Providence to visit the country, recently broke out with great malignity in Tanderagee, and Mr. McConnell, with his family, had retired to the house of a friend, four miles off, in hopes of escaping infection, where he was seized with cholera on Sunday which terminated his existence within a few hours.”
Although the article just laments the passing of one man, it implies that cholera is raging in Tandragee.
Cholera originated in India’s Ganges basin, and up until the present day, as the bacterium mutated, there have been seven cholera pandemics; James’ death took place during the second, which lasted from 1826-1837. The seventh started in 1961 and is considered to still be in progress.
A year earlier, in February 1832, Belfast was dealing with an outbreak of cholera, and the conditions in which the poor of the city lived can be judged by a small detail in the Belfast Commercial Chronicle’s report on the Board of Health’s preparations:
“… take the necessary measures for cleansing and ventilating all the houses occupied by the poor…and for supplying…the inhabitants of them with clean straw for bedding.”
It was not until 1854 that Dr John Snow demonstrated that cholera was spread through contaminated water rather than being contagious.
A Family Tragedy
Four out of the five members of the Whigham family from the Far Pass, three of them children, died during 1840-41 in just four months. However, what caused their deaths is not known; the compulsory registration of deaths and their causes was not introduced in Ireland until 1863.
It was only about 200 years ago that efforts to provide some form of basic medical care for the general population began. In December 1831, Col Close wrote to the Lord Lieutenant to seek permission to establish boards of health for Poyntzpass and Acton.
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