Analysis: Covid-19 shows that society’s primordial fears have not been allayed

Outbreaks of the deadliest infections such as bacillary dysentery, cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, and fever were invariably accompanied by hysteria and popular panic, writes Laurence Geary

A row of coffins at the funeral of victims of a cholera epidemic in St Petersburg, Russia, 1908. File picture: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Disease epidemics have always provoked a very powerful social reaction among all social classes, but particularly among the rural and urban poor, whose tenure and prospects in the 18th and 19th century Ireland were circumscribed even at the best of times. 

Outbreaks of the deadliest infections — bacillary dysentery, cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, and fever, a term which, prior to the 20th century, embraced typhus fever and relapsing fever, two distinct but symptomatically related bacterial infections — were invariably accompanied by hysteria and popular panic.