Armies -- Medical and sanitary affairs; Epidemics -- History; Medicine, Military -- History; Military hygiene
In the years 1633–4 typhus fever and bubonic plague were spread
throughout all Upper and Lower Bavaria by the continued marauding of the
Swedes. The Imperialists, no less than the Swedes, helped to devastate
the country, while the Spanish soldiers had the worst reputation of all.
Again in the year 1635, especially in the autumn, the pestilence
appeared. A plague broke out in Freising after the town was plundered by
the Swedes on July 16, 1634 (Landshut had already been captured by them
on May 10, 1632), and after their departure they left behind them an
infectious disease which was diagnosed by the town-physician as
Hungarian fever. A pestilence broke out in the city when it was
plundered by the soldiers under Bernhard von Weimar, on July 10, 1634,
and carried away one-third of the inhabitants; according to a list
furnished by the court the number of deaths was 738, but there were many
more with whose legacies the court had nothing to do. The bodies were
piled up on wagons and conveyed to cemeteries, while the dwellings of
diseased persons were closed. In Dingolfing, which was occupied by the
Swedes from July 22, 1633, to June 1634, a plague raged with such fury
that it was thought the city would be completely wiped out.
Simbach-on-the-Inn and the near-by market-town of Thann suffered greatly
from a plague in the year 1634. In Thann many bodies lay for a long time
in the houses unburied, while entire families among the poorer
population were wiped out of existence. The plague also raged in the
surrounding localities, and many bodies lay in the streets as food for
scavenger birds. A plague raged in the years 1633–4 in Traunstein, which
had already had a few isolated cases of disease in the previous year;
123 people died terrible deaths in the two years mentioned, and also in
the years 1635–6. In the year 1634 a pestilence caused 500 deaths in
Rosenheim, while severe outbreaks of pestilence were reported from many
surrounding places—Aibling, Miesbach, Wasserburg, and Tegernsee.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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