Armies -- Medical and sanitary affairs; Epidemics -- History; Medicine, Military -- History; Military hygiene
4. Upper Bavaria and Lower Bavaria south of the Danube. On May 17, 1632,
Gustavus Adolphus had occupied Munich, and during his short sojourn of
three weeks apparently no epidemic diseases made their appearance among
the Swedes. But since typhus fever had broken out everywhere in the
vicinity, strict measures of precaution were adopted by the city
authorities. According to G. von Suttner[36] 124 people in the
quarantine-house before the Schwabinger Tor succumbed to ‘burning fever
and headache’ between August and the end of the year. According to a
report published in 1632 the poor people suffered in particular, while
red spots, continual headache, and later on diarrhoea, characterized the
disease. A very severe pestilence broke out in Munich in the year 1634.
‘The epidemic was caused’, says Seitz,[37] ‘by the arrival of 4,000
Spanish soldiers in July of the year 1634; they were called there from
Tölz and Weilheim when the Duke of Saxe-Weimar and General Horn were
threatening the city. Although shortly after that, in August, a few
evidences of disease were noticed, it was not regarded as infectious.
Finally, however, a real plague broke out with such fury that four
lazarets and a garden outside of the city had to be made ready for the
care of the sick. It raged most furiously in the months of October and
November, when from 200 to 250 dwellings, among them entire houses, were
quarantined every week. Thus it went on until the end of December.’
Unfortunately there exists no medical description of the disease, the
most important characteristics of which were chills, accompanied by
internal fever, violent headaches, great lassitude, haemorrhage,
plague-spots, and swellings. All told, some 15,000 persons are said to
have died in the year 1634—about one-half of the total population of the
city. The bodies of victims became so numerous that they were piled up
in the streets and houses, without attempt to keep a record of the
names, and buried in ditches forty at a time. Strict isolation of the
patients by closing up the houses was enforced, and the use of the
clothes and bedding of the dead was forbidden under severe penalties;
such effects were burned outside of the gates. Only two gates remained
open, and in front of one of them a garden was made ready to receive
strangers who were denied admittance into the city. In February 1635,
the pestilence had almost entirely ceased, but in September it broke out
anew and did not disappear until February 1637.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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