Armies -- Medical and sanitary affairs; Epidemics -- History; Medicine, Military -- History; Military hygiene
2. The region between the Main and the Danube suffered no less.
Nuremberg and vicinity was severely attacked by pestilence in the year
1632. In the summer of that year Wallenstein encamped near Fürth, and
Gustavus Adolphus near Nuremberg; they watched each other for a long
time without venturing a battle. The country people had all fled to the
city. In the Swedish army and in the overcrowded city, which had some
50,000 inhabitants, scurvy and typhus fever carried away many
thousands.[35] Only 4,522 bodies were buried by the Church, but many
more thousands died. Two weeks after his disastrous attack on
Wallenstein’s camp on September 4, Gustavus Adolphus marched south,
while Wallenstein turned into Saxony. The plague continued to rage in
the vicinity of Nuremberg, and many people contracted the disease by
visiting the deserted camp of the Imperialist army and appropriating the
left-behind implements, weapons, and kitchen utensils. Scurvy was still
raging in Nuremberg in the following year. In the year 1634 the plague
broke out and carried away 18,000 persons. In December 1631 Forchheim
was besieged by the Swedes under General Horn, and the result was that a
pestilence broke out in the year 1632 and carried away 578 inhabitants;
the average number of deaths per annum was 45. In March of that year the
Swedes had deserted the city, and in June 1634, when they reappeared
there, the mortality increased again. In the years 1631–2 Uffenheim
suffered a great deal from the predatory raids of the Swedes and also
from plague, which in the year 1634 became very widespread there as in
all Bavaria, carrying away one-half of the inhabitants of the town.
While the Swedes and Imperialists were establishing their camps near
Nuremberg, many people from Ansbach and other places fled to Windsheim,
which thus became greatly overcrowded; the consequence was that people
died there by the hundred, and their bodies were buried, thirty or forty
at a time, in large ditches. When the Swedes left Nuremberg and appeared
in Windsheim, they left behind them 450 men who were infected with
disease; in the entire year 1,564 bodies were counted. In the following
year the city was besieged by the Imperialists (October 12–23, 1633),
and during this time 360 persons succumbed to a pestilential disease;
the number of deaths in the entire year, including the outsiders, was
1,600. Windsheim also suffered greatly in the two following years; at
the end of the year 1635 there were only 50 inhabitants left. In near-by
Burgbernheim, where typhus fever raged in the year 1630, 155 persons
died in the year 1632, 165 in 1634, and 107 in 1636. In Schwabach, which
had been plundered by the Imperialists in the latter part of July, 1632,
various diseases broke out—‘Hungarian disease, dysentery, and even
bubonic plague.’ In the year 1633 there were 298 deaths in Weissenburg;
in 1634, on the other hand, there were 642. Eichstätt had 494 deaths in
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