When the French troops were transported back to France, energetic and extensive measures of precaution were adopted; only those troops were allowed to embark who had for several weeks been entirely recovered from typhus fever; several stations for the discharge of men who contracted the disease on the way were located along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and sixty-two patients, all told, were left behind at them; suspected divisions of troops, before disembarking at Marseilles, were quarantined for a time on several islands along the coast, on St. Marguerite (Îles de Lérins), on the Îles d’Hyères, and on others, and before entering the city they were examined again, bathed, and reclothed. The result was successful. Laveran says:[208] ‘The further one went away from the seat of the infection, and the more the soldiers scattered, the more the miasm seemed to lose strength; in France the typhus-fever patients gave rise to only a few cases inside the hospitals where they were being cared for; the disease was never communicated to the civil population.’ Sporadic cases were observed in Marseilles, Toulon, Avignon, Chalon-sur-Saône, and in other places. A small lazaret-epidemic also occurred in Paris in the Val-de-Grâce; according to Godelier,[209] almost all the patients there belonged to the Fiftieth Regiment, which on November 30, 1855, embarked at Kamiesch. The condition of health in the regiment at that time was good, and, in particular, it was free of typhus fever. Of the two ships on which the soldiers were transported, the one took only thirty days to get from Kamiesch to Marseilles and had no cases of typhus fever, while the other, which had a harder voyage, took fifty days and had numerous cases of typhus fever on the way; fifteen patients were put into the hospital at Malta and twenty-five in that at Marseilles. No less than fifty-eight soldiers in this regiment contracted the disease in the Val-de-Grâce, and they infected five nurses; eight soldiers and one nurse fell victims to the disease. 3. THE NORTH AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (1861–5)