Armies -- Medical and sanitary affairs; Epidemics -- History; Medicine, Military -- History; Military hygiene
very dangerous wherever patients were left or congregated in large or
small hospitals.’
As early as the month of February, the disease had reached its climax in
Württemberg; in March it began to abate rapidly, so that in the first
part of the summer only 150 patients could be counted in fifteen
Governmental Districts. From then until the end of the year it broke out
only sporadically. Braun,[164] who asserts that more than half of the
physicians in Württemberg contracted typhus fever, mentions the names
and residences of seventeen physicians who succumbed to it; we see from
this list that the disease was prevalent throughout all Württemberg. The
disease was also conveyed to the southern part of Upper Swabia.
According to Dillenius, 1,300 sick soldiers were sent in the first part
of the year 1814 from France (especially from Mülhausen in Alsace) to
the military hospital at Tettnang; twenty-four of them died on the way,
and in the course of the following four months five times as many
succumbed to typhus fever in the hospital.[165]
Baden suffered severely from typhus fever; in Karlsruhe, for instance,
typhus fever raged from October to December 1813. But Baden suffered
particularly, for the reason that all the sick soldiers in the Bohemian
army were sent back there from France. Their number far exceeded all
expectations, since typhus fever was uncommonly prevalent in the field
army in France, and the soldiers arriving from there infected the
hospitals. Even when the Austrian and Russian troops marched through the
country the number of ‘nerve-fever’ patients was very large. Freiburg im
Breisgau, at that time a city of 9,000 inhabitants, suffered very
severely in consequence of enforced quartering; some 210,000 soldiers
were housed in the homes of its citizens. In the garrison lazaret and
university hospital, which together had room for 500 patients, no less
than 1,200 patients were crowded together in December 1813; almost all
of them were suffering from diarrhoea and typhus, and owing to the lack
of linen they were compelled to lie in their own dirty clothes on sacks
of straw. Every morning two large wagonloads of dead bodies were driven
away for burial. As usual, the pestilence spread to the civil
population, carrying away entire families. On October 12, 1813, the
former Abbey of Thennenbach was converted into a military lazaret, in
which two weeks later some 1,200 patients were sheltered, although it
had adequate room for only 700. Between December 27, 1813, and March
1814, 567 soldiers succumbed there, most of them to typhus and
dysentery. The epidemic reached its climax about the middle of January,
when as many as thirty persons died per diem. After the middle of
January the number of deaths rapidly decreased.[166] Northern Baden was
also attacked. In Mannheim the sick and wounded French soldiers who
arrived after the battles of Lützen and Bautzen were led around the city
and taken to Spires. Thus typhus fever did not appear in Mannheim
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