The Typhus of 1847

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experienced such pain in ridding myself of the hold of a woman who was breastfeeding a newborn. The unfortunate woman and her children were in a state of almost complete nudity. The police opened a house that had been closed for several days; we found on the floor two frozen cadavers, half devoured by rats! A mother in delirium had wanted, for the sake of modesty, to bury and hide her daughter’s completely naked cadaver under the rocks, she was twelve years old. The doctor at the clinic found SEVEN people in a house sheltered under the same blanket. One of the members of this group of people had been dead for several hours. The survivors did not have the strength to remove the corpse nor move themselves. . . . . . . .� Again we read in a commissioner’s report in the BUREAU DE BIENFAISANCE (Poor law Union) from Skibbereen, county Cork, to the Interior Minister, Sir George GREY, that the inhabitants of this unfortunate city were dying like imprisoned brutes. A frightening apathy, like that which characterizes the illstricken, numbs the unfortunate population. Hunger has destroyed any seed of generous sympathy in this town; despair has rendered it insensitive and has in a way petrified it. It awaits its last moment, with a sad indifference, not fear. There is not a single unfortunate home in which death has not entered. Whole families, devoured by this ardent fever, are sprawled on rotting straw, strewn here and there on a humid floor, and no one is ever there to moisten their burning lips or lift their poor heads. The husband dies next to his wife, without her seeming to doubt that he has nevertheless liberated himself from the sufferings of this earth.


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