The effects of the
Famine were not usually very sudden. People dragged on life for weeks,
partly through that tenacity of life which is one of the characteristics
of human nature; partly through chance scraps of food obtained from time
to time, and in various ways. Families have gone on for many weeks on
boiled turnips, with a little oatmeal sprinkled over them; often on
green rape, and even the wild herbs of the fields and seaweed; such
things kept prolonging life whilst they were destroying it. After a
while they brought on dysentery: dysentery--death. But no one thought of
a coroner in such cases, which were by far the most numerous class of
cases until fever became prevalent, and even then dysentery commonly
came in to close the scene.
"During that period," writes Mr. James H. Tuke, "the roads in many
places became as charnel-houses, and several car and coach drivers have
assured me that they rarely drove anywhere without seeing dead bodies
strewn along the road side, and that, in the dark, they had even gone
over them. A gentleman told me that in the neighbourhood of Clifden one
Inspector of roads had caused no less than 140 bodies to be buried,
which he found scattered along the highway.
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