2: A Brief History of Cabin Fever

Early literary references to ‘cabin fever’ use the term to describe typhus, a contagious disease spread by lice (Fig. 2.1) that has blighted human populations since at least the fifteenth century CE, though medical historians have suggested it as a likely cause of the Plague of Athens in 430 BCE (Angelakis, Bechah, & Raoult, 2016; Raoult, Woodward, & Dumler, 2004; Urban, 1820). Before the Great Famine or An Gorta Mór (1845–1849) in Ireland many of the Irish poor, in rural locations, lived in single-room mud cabins or an bothán – according to the 1841 census 42% of Irish families occupied such dwellings (Robertson, 1879). These mud cabins became associated with the spread of typhus fever due to their confined and overcrowded space. Some cabins or bothán scóir were used by travelling farm labourers (McGarry, 2020), and this movement and the rural population's generosity in providing shelter to travellers, no doubt, increased infections. Indeed, as King (1927, p. 2644) indicates, the Irish people called typhus infection ‘“road fever,” since it especially attacked wandering people’. He goes on: