A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2 (of 2): From the Extinction of Plague to the Present TimeCreighton, Charles
History
A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2 (of 2): From the Extinction of Plague to the Present Time
Creighton, Charles
Epidemics -- Great Britain -- History
Monro gives a similar account of the camp sickness among the British
troops during the campaigns in North Germany in 1760-63. In the autumn of
1760, before he joined the forces, there had been much malignant fever and
dysentery: the camp at Warburg was near the battlefield (31 July, 1760),
where many of the dead were scarce covered with earth; there were also
many dead horses, and in a time of heavy rains, the camp, with the
neighbouring villages and fields, was filled with the excrements of a
numerous army. Not only the soldiers, but the inhabitants of the country,
who were reduced to the greatest misery and want, were infected, and whole
villages almost laid waste. When Monro joined at Paderborn in January,
1761, he found the hospitals overcrowded, and the malignancy of the fever
thereby much increased, so that a great many died. “The 1st and 3rd
regiments suffered most, owing to all the sick of each regiment being put
into a particular hospital by themselves, which kept up the infection, so
that they lost one-third of those left ill of this fever, and many of the
nurses and people who attended them were seized with it.” He distributed
the sick men of the Coldstreams among the houses in the town, and lost few
in comparison with the 1st and 3rd regiments. The contagion, under this
bold policy, did not spread.
Two points in the symptoms are noteworthy: first the occurrence of
suppurating buboes of the groins and armpits in several; and, secondly,
the frequency of round worms.
“In this fever it was common for patients to vomit worms, or to pass
them by stool, or, what was more frequent, to have them come up into
the throat or mouth, and sometimes into their nostrils, while they
were asleep in bed, and to pull them out with their fingers. The same
thing happened to most of the British soldiers brought to the
hospitals for other feverish disorders as well as this.”
He cannot explain the commonness of round worms in the sick, unless it was
from the great quantity of crude vegetables and fruits eaten, and the bad
water. Patients in convalescence often suffered from deafness, and from
suppurating parotids. Some had frequent relapses into the fever, “which
seemed to be owing to the irritation of these insects,” namely the worms.
Most of those who fell into profuse, kindly, warm sweats recovered, the
sweats lasting from twelve to forty-eight hours, and carrying off the
fever. He never saw any miliary eruptions, and only sometimes petechiae,
or small spots, or marbling as in measles[193].
Ship-Fever in the Seven Years’ War and American War.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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