Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University
Cormac OGr‡da, University College, Dublin

The Irish Famine remains unique in the annals of the 19th century as the largest disaster of its kind in the heart of the wealthy North-Atlantic world. About 1.1 million people died in Ireland who would not have died otherwise. In this paper we delve into the sources of mortality during the Famine and use the nosological data in the 1851 Census to try to establish to what extent death was the result of inevitable famine-caused factors, or the spread of infectious diseases that were caused indirectly through the disruptions and shocks that the Famine inflicted on communities and individuals. The latter category, we hypothesize, contains hundreds of thousands deaths that might have been avoided had medical science been more knowledgeable about the nature of infectious disease and its modes of transmission.