Epidemics Resulting from Wars

(a) Central Europe

The Thirty Years’ War left Germany for several decades in such a weakened condition that Louis XIV was able to perpetrate all sorts of outrages upon the unfortunate country. The result was a series of protracted conflicts in the countries on the Rhine. The German Emperor, however, was unable to fight with much vigour, partly because of disruption in the interior of the German Empire, and partly because the advancing Turks were gravely menacing its eastern boundary. After Louis XIV had come to terms with Holland in the Peace of Nimeguen (1679), in order to secure for his protégé the Archbishopric of Cologne, which was then vacant, he invaded Germany without declaring war, and his troops committed horrible devastations in the Palatinate and in northern Baden. A German army was organized to oppose the French, but it accomplished very little. Regarding the pestilences of that time not much is known, although it is certain that typhus fever was present in the armies. Thus we learn from a physician named R. Lentilius^[59] that in November 1689, ‘burning head-disease’ or ‘Hungarian disease’ was disseminated by Bavarian soldiers who, under Max Emanuel, had taken part in the successful siege of Mayence (ending on September 11), and who afterwards returned home to pass the winter. Typhus fever was conveyed by them to Gundelfingen, Lauingen, Höchstädt, Donauwörth, and Wendingen (all of them places on the Danube between Ulm and Ingolstadt), causing a great many deaths. In many places—for example, in Gundelfingen—the epidemic lasted well into the following year.

In the very first year of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–14) Augsburg suffered terribly from camp-pestilences, which also spread among the non-belligerent population. In the year 1703 the city was occupied by the French and Bavarians fighting as allies, and was afterwards besieged by the Imperialists and the English.^[60] The number of deaths in Augsburg (excluding the still-births) was:

Seitz reports that the troops along the Rhine were again infected with petechial fever in the year 1712; Metz, on the other hand, expressly says that no pestilences occurred at that time.

In the year 1733 a conflict again broke out between France and Germany over the Polish succession. In the year 1734 typhus fever appeared along the Rhine; in the spring and summer the outbreaks were sporadic, but in the fall, when troops were stationed along both sides of the Rhine, a virulent typhus broke out in many places, as in Heidelberg, Heilbronn, and Germersheim; the disease was borne even to Lorraine by French troops returning from the siege of Philippsburg.^[61]

In connexion with the War of the Austrian Succession (1741–8), which Maria Theresa waged in conjunction with England and Hanover against Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, France, and Spain, we know of several outbreaks of pestilence. In the year 1742 Bavaria was overrun by Austrian troops; a severe pestilence broke out in that year in Ingolstadt and carried away several thousand of the strong French garrison there. A large number of civilians also died.^[62] It is stated that the French garrison at Amberg lost 1,200 men, and that 400 of the inhabitants perished; it is very probable that the specific disease was typhus fever.

An unusually severe epidemic broke out in the year 1742 in Prague; on November 26, 1741, the city was stormed by the Bavarians and French, and shortly afterwards it was besieged by the Austrians under the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The number of men in the French garrison was 13,000, and the siege lasted until December 25, 1742. Almost all the French physicians and surgeons died; on the bodies of the inhabitants of the city appeared petechiae, which, it is stated, were not observed among the French. All told, 30,000 people are said to have been carried away by the epidemic in Prague. The high mortality was due to the wrong treatment of the disease by the French physicians, who held it to be inflammatory and sought to cure it by means of drastic phlebotomy. ‘Cette grande mortalité,’ says Ozanam, ‘fut attribuée au traitement suivi par les médecins français, qui, malgré l’avis de ceux du pays, saignaient les malades jusqu’à ce qu’ils expirassent sous la lancette, et par l’abus qu’ils firent de l’émétique qu’ils administrèrent jusqu’au 7^e, 8^e, 9^e, et 10^e jour.’^[63] (The high mortality was due to the treatment given by the French physicians, who, despite the advice of the local physicians, bled the patients until they expired under the lancet, and overdosed them with emetics as far along as the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth day.) The Prussian army in Silesia was also infected with typhus fever, and it was not long before all the corps and the native population were attacked.^[64]

The Austrian and English army, the so-called Pragmatic army, which in the year 1743 operated in the region of the Main, and which on July 27, 1743, won a victory at Dettingen (near Aschaffenburg), suffered severely, according to Pringle^[65], from dysentery and hospital fever. The hospital for the English army was situated in the village of Fechenheim (near Hanau); all the patients sent there, even those who had some mild form of sickness, were infected with a camp-fever, which according to the description must have been typhus fever, and almost one-half of them died. The inhabitants of the village were also attacked, and nearly all of them succumbed. According to Neuwied, the disease was brought there in the evacuations of the sick and carried even to England by returning English soldiers.

The Seven Years’ War was attended by several epidemics of typhus fever. Notwithstanding the long duration of the war, they did not become very widespread, inasmuch as the armies were comparatively small, and as the scene of the fighting, in accordance with the military tactics of Frederick the Great, who opposed first one and then another Power, kept changing, and thus caused no one region to suffer for any great length of time. A severe epidemic of typhus fever broke out in Silesia in the year 1758; it raged in both the Austrian and Prussian armies, and spread to many places, for example, to Breslau, Schweidnitz, and Landshut, where the civil inhabitants also became infected. In Breslau, according to Grätzer,^[66] the number of deaths among the evangelical population was:

According to Süssmilch,^[67] the number of deaths among the Catholics in the year 1758 was 5,135; thus the total number of deaths in the entire civil population was 9,223. In addition, the following military persons were buried: 5,470 Prussian soldiers, 2,153 Austrian soldiers, 18 Swedish soldiers; also 755 wives and children of soldiers, and 953 paupers and outsiders. The total number of interments in Breslau in that year was 18,572. The great mortality lasted from January to June; of 9,349 military persons buried, there died in:

In the year 1757, in which there was a high mortality in a large part of North Germany that was unaffected by the war, there was an unusually large number of deaths in Dresden; in the year 1760, when the city was beleaguered by Frederick the Great, a ‘virulent epidemic fever’ broke out and again caused a great increase in the death-rate. The number of deaths in Dresden (excluding the still-births) was:^[68]

The increased number of deaths during the Seven Years’ War in the countries where the fighting took place is shown by the following figures (which include the still-births) for Berlin and Leipzig:

Typhus fever also appeared in the western scene of the war, where the Imperialist and French troops were fighting against the Prussians. When the united Imperialist and French armies besieged Eisenach for two weeks, the disease broke out in both military hospitals in the city and afterwards spread among the inhabitants, causing many deaths.