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Week IV

On March 2 1875, the medical officer of the Athenry Dispensary District, Dr WJ Leonard, wrote an urgent letter to the Local Government Board (LGB ) in Dublin, regretting to report a ‘very bad case of smallpox’ which had come into his district the previous day. He briefly described how it was discovered:

An Irishman’s Diary

In the early decades of the 19th century fortunes were made in giving hundreds of thousands of emigrants safe passage to America. As the decades slipped by the numbers grew into millions. Liverpool had the main transatlantic business for these two islands, but Galway, situated some 300 miles closer to America, and with the onset of powerful steam-driven ships, believed that a better and quicker service could be provided.

The first book printed in Ireland was The Book of Common Prayer in 1551. As printing became more sophisticated, newspapers became inevitable. The first gazettes were published originally in manuscript – the word gazette being derived from gazetto, a coin of Venice, the amount paid for reading the news. The earliest printed newspapers began to appear around the end of the 16th century. These were small, quarto in size, printed on one or both sides of the page, or of four pages containing intelligence of public interest which were variously called 'Books of Newes', ‘Newe Newes’...