Harty Maps

This is the map Harty included in his "An historical sketch."

From Harty's data, I then created a number of additional maps to better visualize his information and assess the conclusions he drew.

These maps show number of sick, or number of deaths, respectively, as a proportion of the total population estimate provided by Harty.

It is interesting that Harty did not calculate these values himself, since it would seem to be more valuable to be able to see which counties were disproportionately affected, than to just have absolute numbers of deaths from the epidemic.  

I also used his data to visualize the different patterns in mortality across the country over the course of the epidemic.

To do this, I plotted Harty's data of deaths at each Fever Hospital over the course of the three years. Since the data is based off hospital deaths, it is not completely representative of the area as a whole, but it still successfully shows the course of the epidemic, and how it peaked and waned in different areas of Ireland. A darker red spot shows a higher relative mortality from fever in that area. 

Not every town had a fever hospital so the white areas do not mean that those towns did not suffer from fever, but simply that data was not avaiable. In addition I used GPS co-ordinates from the modern-day town center to plot each town on the map, so it may not be exactly where Harty considered the town to be. For this reason, and because people would travel from the surrounding areas to the hospital, I blurred the visualization of each data point.

Since much of Harty's data was organized by county I used Thomson's 1815 map of Ireland to extract the county boundaries at approximately that time. If any boundaries changed between 1815 and 1820, then the map I created may not be completely accurate. Thomson's map is also useful to note the locations of particularly important towns and counties to better understand Harty's data.