During the summer the condition of health among the Russian troops was comparatively good;[355] on August 26 there were 132 officers and 5,661 men in the lazarets. In the first part of October typhoid fever broke out in Port Arthur, where it was endemic, and before long an epidemic of such severity was raging in the city that it was difficult to find places in which to shelter the patients. There were also a great many cases of dysentery. Owing to the lack of preserved meat and vegetables, scurvy also made its appearance; the first cases of the disease were observed early in October. In the latter part of that month there were in the lazarets 450 typhoid-fever patients, 855 dysentery patients, and 167 scurvy patients. In addition to these diseases, cases of night-blindness (inability to see after dusk) were observed; the latter disease is quite common among Russian country-people, being caused by bad nourishment. In December the garrison was completely exhausted. Scurvy had become more and more widespread, and between the fourteenth and twenty-seventh of that month 71 officers and 1,790 men had been committed to the lazarets. On the day of the surrender (January 2, 1905) the number of men in the Russian garrison was 32,400, and of these 6,458 were lying sick or wounded in the lazarets.[356] Of the remaining 25,942 men, 13,207 were incapacitated; thus the number of healthy men (besides 2,193 marines) in the garrison at the time of the surrender was only 12,735. Regarding the loss of life during the siege we find no information in the report of the General Staff. The number of soldiers in the city (excluding the officers and officials) was 41,780 at the beginning and 32,400 at the end of the siege. No further information regarding the condition of health among the civil inhabitants of Port Arthur is obtainable. CONCLUSION The history of war-pestilences has shown how severely belligerent armies are attacked by infectious diseases, how seriously their operations are hampered by them, and what loss of life such diseases cause by spreading to non-combatants. If we start from the time when more or less accurate descriptions enable us to determine the nature of the epidemics, we find that plague and typhus fever were the two diseases which, until a few decades ago, most commonly attacked the soldiers; the latter disease, which made its appearance in almost every war that was waged between the beginning of the sixteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century, consequently acquired the name ‘war-plague’.