Armies -- Medical and sanitary affairs; Epidemics -- History; Medicine, Military -- History; Military hygiene
Even if it is impossible to give an accurate numerical account of the
losses due to pestilence in the course of the Thirty Years’ War, we have
seen in a general way how epidemics of dysentery, typhus fever, and
bubonic plague followed at the heels of armies, how they were borne from
place to place, and how the devastation of the country caused by the war
led to an absolute dearth of the necessaries of life, and thereby helped
the pestilences to spread. We have mentioned only those places regarding
which we have specific information, and they can be regarded only as
examples of how these pestilences appeared; as a matter of fact,
however, conditions were very much the same in all parts of the country.
At the same time these examples show satisfactorily that the great
depopulation of Germany during the Thirty Years’ War was chiefly caused
by severe epidemics of typhus fever and bubonic plague.
It will be of interest to assemble the figures (such as have been
recorded) relating to the number of deaths that occurred in a few of the
larger cities during the Thirty Years’ War. We include Basel among those
cities, since, being situated close to the border of that part of
Germany where the war was carried on during two rather long periods, it
was necessarily attacked by the prevalent pestilences. At the same time
Basel affords an example of how quickly these pestilences disappeared
from the cities, even in the seventeenth century, if external conditions
permitted the authorities to take the necessary measures of prevention
and precaution, and if the cities were not constantly being reinfected.
We give the total number of deaths, and merely remark that the
population in all German cities in the course of the Thirty Years’ War
decreased considerably. In the case of Leipzig, Dresden, and
Frankfurt-on-the-Main the still-births are included, but not in the case
of Augsburg, Basel, and Strassburg. As a rule the country-people who
fled to the cities are not included among the dead; only in the case of
Strassburg, and perhaps also in that of Breslau for the year 1633, are
they included.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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