Armies -- Medical and sanitary affairs; Epidemics -- History; Medicine, Military -- History; Military hygiene
16,000 to 17,000; more than two-thirds of the population are said to
have succumbed. The pestilence was borne from Schweidnitz to
Peterswaldau and Nimptsch, where from 2,000 to 2,400 persons died. On
May 31, 1633, Wallenstein came with his army to Glatz, bringing
pestilence with him; in Glatz itself 4,284 people were carried away,
while many hundreds died in the surrounding country. Petschkau was
almost completely wiped out. In Neisse the number of victims is
estimated at 6,000; 5,272 are recorded in the church registers.
Generally speaking, Thuringia was but slightly affected by plagues in
the years 1631–3, but suffered terribly in the years 1634–5; for in
those years there, as in all Germany, a great famine prevailed. In
Koburg a plague broke out in the year 1630; in 1632 there was an
epidemic of ‘head-disease’, which carried away 300 persons in October
alone, and in 1634 an epidemic of bubonic plague, rendered even more
destructive by famine, carried away 1,143 victims. Several pestilences
(dysentery and ‘burning fever’) also broke out in the Koburg region,
caused by the quartering and ravaging of Swedish troops; the inhabitants
died by hundreds. Hildburghausen suffered from a plague from June on;
whereas only 106 people had died there from January to May, the number
of deaths in June alone was 215. In the following year 534 people died
there from starvation and pestilence, while 169 died in near-by
Streufdorf. Eisfeld (west of Hildburghausen) in 1632 had been plundered
by Swedish troops, and from that time on suffered from pestilence. In
Meiningen, in the latter part of 1635 and the first part of 1636, 500
people succumbed to a plague (106 in November alone). Suhl, which on
October 16 had been burned by Isolani’s soldiers, and Themar—both near
Meiningen—had 1,634 deaths. In the following year 519 people died in
Schmalkalden and vicinity—250 in Tambach, 300 in Vachdorf, and 1,600 in
Salzungen. In the year 1634 the number of deaths in Eisenach was 1,800,
and in the following year 1,600; in the year 1636 there were only 405
deaths there. Erfurt suffered very little in 1635, while Ohrdruf had
1,065 deaths, Wechmar 503, and Arnstadt 464. In Weimar 1,600 people died
in the year 1635, among them 500 foreigners from Franconia who had taken
refuge there. The cities lying further east in Thuringia had been
severely attacked in the years 1632 and 1633, in consequence of the
pestilences in Saxony; for example, Gera, which had been infected in
1633 by Holk’s troops, the near-by village of Untermhaus, which in the
two years had 211 and 600 deaths respectively, and also many other
villages in the surrounding country. A plague in Schleiz carried away
600 persons in the year 1632.
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