The rinderpest of the present time, and the contagious cattle distempers of former ages, in these islands and on the continent : considered especially with reference to the connection between those distempers and cholera, plague, and other epidemic diseases / by Thomas More Madden.

  • Thomas More Madden
Date:
1866
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The rinderpest of the present time, and the contagious cattle distempers of former ages, in these islands and on the continent : considered especially with reference to the connection between those distempers and cholera, plague, and other epidemic diseases / by Thomas More Madden. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Duhlin Journal, 1737; Dublin Courani, 1741; Dublin Chronicle, 1788; Due's Occurrences, Freeman's Journal, Evening Post, and Hibernian Journal, all previously to 1775. In 1747-46 there was a murrain in Ireland, the symp- toms of which are thus described:—“ A dry, husky cough, foetid breath, shivering, diarrhoea; or, in some cases, ob- stinate constipation.” In December, 1748, the cattle plague seems to have been imported from England into Ireland. We read in the journals for that month, under the head of “ Ireland”:—‘‘ A distemper is got among the horned cattle in some parts of this kingdom, which seizes them with a sudden swelling in their heads and necks, and often proves fatal; it is ascribed to the very warm season.” In September, 1749, a similar epizootic was observed in Ireland. I shall not here copy every record of disease amongst cattle in Ireland during the latter half of the eighteenth century, containedln the Dublin newspapers and periodi- cals of that period, most of which appear to have been the ordinary maladies of horned cattle. In 1802 influenza, which then prevailed among cattle in Central Germany, invaded this country, and early next year it began to attack mankind, and soon became a wide-spread, though seldom dangerous, epidemic in Ireland. In 1803 dysentery was epidemic in Ireland, and a similar epizootic, known as the “ bloody murrain,” prevailed among cattle. The next important epizootic is recorded in 1839, when, as we read in the early volumes of The Dublin Medical Press, which commenced in that year, and in the fifth part of the Census Keport for 1851, vol. i., that after a hard wet winter the “ epidemic atmospheric constitution,” which from this year prevailed more or less in Ireland for some years, and which finally culminated in “ the fever and famine years” of 1846-47, began to manifest itself in July, when the potato blight appeared, and in the same month an epizootic, not confined to horned cattle, pre- vailed in the North of Ireland. The following year was
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