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(PDF) What do people die of during famines: The Great Irish Famine in comparative perspective [1]

['Authors']

Date: 2025-05

. Conclusion

The dimensions of a disaster depend on the size of the impact and the vul-

nerability of the society upon which it is inflicted. The functional relation

between outcome and the two determinants is, however, additive rather

than multiplicative. Even seemingly invulnerable societies can be devastated

if the impact is large enough. Conversely, weak and vulnerable societies may

survive for long periods if they are lucky enough to avoid major challenges.

Sadly, Ireland was not lucky. Ireland’s vulnerability was in terms of its over-

all poverty, the physical impossibility of storing potatoes, and the thinness

of markets in basic subsistence goods due to the prevalence of the potato.

But there is a second dimension to the vulnerability which compounds the

first one, and that is that all populations of the time were vulnerable to an

increase in the incidence of infectious diseases in the case of outside shocks.

The absence of a clear understanding of the nature of disease meant that the

privations and disruptions of the Famine quickly translated themselves into

the horror-filled statistics of Wilde’s  ‘Tables of Death’.

A careful analysis of epidemics during past famines can help us toward a

better understanding of precisely what happened in the past. The under-

standing of the epidemiology and etiology of infectious diseases and the

physiology of their symptoms, and the knowledge of how to treat patients

suffering from basic ailments such as fever and diarrhoea, will remain with

us even if antibiotics lose some of their effectiveness with the proliferation

of drug-resistant strains. Equally, an analysis of the role of epidemics in

twentieth-century famines offers a better insight into famine mortality in a

counterfactual mid-nineteenth century Ireland, where the potato failed but

where the scientific advances following the work of Pasteur and Koch had

already been absorbed. It suggests that had Phytophthora Infestans attacked

only a few decades later, a better understanding of the basic mechanisms of

death would have influenced public health policy and, in particular, would

have saved many middle-class lives. However, the analysis of modern third-

world famines suggests that many of the poor would still have died.

Economic and political progress is a precondition for modern health tech-

nologies playing their part in improving the health of the masses.

Acknowledgements

This is an abbreviated and considerably amended version of a paper given at a con-

ference on famine demography held at Les Treilles, France,  April– May .

The longer version is available as Mokyr and Ó Gráda, . We are grateful to the

Fondatin des Treilles for hospitablity, and to co-participants and two anonymous

referees for their comments.

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[1] Url: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4768797_What_do_people_die_of_during_famines_The_Great_Irish_Famine_in_comparative_perspective

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