William Wilde and the Early Records of Consumption in Ireland

Absence of documentary or bony evidence before the seventeenth century in Ireland is not conclusive evidence of freedom from tuberculosis. Clear records begin with Bills of Mortality kept in Dublin, the city at the centre of English administration of Ireland, and they show that the basis for an epidemic was firmly established therein before 1700. In the middle of the nineteenth century the cataclysmic Famine opened the floodgates of poverty and urban overcrowding that resulted in an alarming death rate that continued to increase until the early years of the twentieth century. It is to William Wilde (1815-1876) we owe the nuanced investigation of the earliest numerical records of consumption and related disorders in Ireland.