‘This Revived Old Plague’¹: Coping with Flu

Abstract

In nineteenth-century Ireland, influenza was among the staples of the GP’s waiting room.² An outbreak in 1803, which ‘overspread’ Europe, was stated by the Local Government Board to have begun in Ireland, and the Board’s report cited eight more visitations of the infection before 1850. The pandemic of 1847 also touched Ireland, compounding hardship in the most brutal year of the Famine.³ Doctors noted that ‘before this period the influenza was little more than known by name’. Its ‘desperately overpowering influence had not hitherto been felt’, but now it ‘spread in a way which it had never been known to do before, and assumed a variety of shape and form quite new’ to their experience; victims were ‘calculated as more numerous than even those of the deadly cholera’. At a time when the ‘full tide of death flowed on everywhere’ in Ireland, however, outbreaks of flu seemed to draw little attention and seldom featured in the medical reports on the Famine.⁴ Even some of the colloquial names given to flu, such as the ‘old hin’ and the ‘homely malady’, offer hints that influenza was not usually the kind of disease that evoked dread like fever, or that stirred panic like smallpox or cholera.⁵

Irish Times, 15 January 1890.