Armies -- Medical and sanitary affairs; Epidemics -- History; Medicine, Military -- History; Military hygiene
In the case of the two adjacent confederate states of
Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz no small-pox mortality
statistics are available. On September 20, prisoners from Metz were
taken to the reserve lazaret in Schwerin, and among them was a small-pox
patient who died eight days later. In the same month an assistant in the
lazaret was taken sick, and in October and December two more members of
the lazaret staff contracted the disease. The pestilence spread to the
civil population because the attendants who were commissioned to dispose
of the effects of the dead, instead of destroying them, sold or gave
them to the inhabitants. The epidemic, which spread rapidly throughout
the surrounding country, was quite severe and lasted until March 1871.
In Wismar two cases of small-pox were reported among the prisoners in
December, and these were followed by six more cases in January and
February; in the garrison, which averaged 1,219 men, there were 48 cases
of the disease (5 in January, 32 in February, 9 in March, and 2 in
April); 3 of the 48 were fatal. At Rostock 649 prisoners arrived on
November 11, and these were followed by 544 more on December 14; among
the latter there were two small-pox patients, and in the course of the
next few months forty-one more cases of the disease and six deaths were
reported.
Berlin suffered severely from an epidemic of small-pox in the years
1871–2. The last large epidemic there had occurred in the year 1801, and
had carried away 1,626 out of 176,700 inhabitants. In the year 1864
another rather mild epidemic had broken out, but had quickly
disappeared. In the year 1870 the number of small-pox patients in Berlin
was small; an average of nine persons per month succumbed to the disease
between the first part of August and the last part of November. In the
month of December 1870 the death-rate began to increase, at first rather
slowly; the number of deaths in that month was 22, and in March 1872 it
was 176. The epidemic now began to spread rapidly, and in June it
reached its climax with 648 deaths; during the summer it abated a
little, but in the fall it began to rage more and more furiously until
December, when it reached a second climax with 671 deaths. The progress
of the epidemic is shown by the following table, taken from Guttstadt’s
excellent book. The number of deaths caused by small-pox in Berlin was:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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