Hunger, Cholera & Plague-breath: Dealing with Famine Diseases in Belfast

Name: Hunger, Cholera & Plague-breath: Dealing with Famine Diseases in Belfast
Start: 2026-05-27T19:00:00+01:00
Location: 2 North Queen Street , BT15 1ES Belfast, United Kingdom

Schedule

Wed, 27 May, 2026 at 07:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

2 North Queen Street , BT15 1ES Belfast, United Kingdom | Belfast, NI

During the crisis of the late 1840s, thousands of people poured into Belfast seeking an escape from the effects of the potato blight and subsequent hunger. One Belfast physician described the new arrivals by their plague-breath, the diseases they breathed into the growing town. Belfast’s public health system was overwhelmed as diseases like typhus, smallpox and dysentery raged through the town in 1847 before the arrival of the most feared epidemic, cholera.
This talk looks at how Belfast’s medical network coped with unprecedented levels of disease and how the institutions of the town dealt with the unfolding catastrophe. It will show the lasting effects of the Famine outbreaks of disease on the growing town and what remains in Belfast today of this terrible period of disease and death.
Our Speaker:
Dr Robyn Atcheson is a social historian and history communicator who specialises in the history of poverty and public health in nineteenth-century Belfast. She consults on public history projects and is well known as an expert on the Famine and the workhouse in Belfast. Dr Atcheson has been involved in a project to mark the burial ground of the Belfast workhouse and regularly appears in local media discussing the social history of Belfast as well as her research in medical history and women’s history. She contributed the chapter on Poorhouse to Pandemic in the most recent book about the history of Belfast Charitable Society.