‘Les dames religieuses de la Charité, chargées du service des salles, les élèves en chirurgie, les servans, les gardes de nuit, le casernier, les gendarmes qui escortaient les voitures remplies de prisonniers malades, le chapelain, le secrétaire du commissaire des guerres, les personnes que la charité évangélique a fait imprudemment entrer dans les salles, ont été frappés de la maladie. Tous ont couru des risques, quelques-uns ont succombé.’ (The nuns who had charge of the rooms (in the hospital) at La Charité, the medical students, the attendants, the night-watchmen, the porter, the gendarmes who escorted the carriages conveying sick prisoners, the chaplain, the secretary of the War Commissioner, and the persons who imprudently allowed a sense of duty and charity to induce them to enter the rooms—all contracted the disease. They all ran risks, and some of them died.) Nevertheless, Boin did not hold the disease in Bourges to be typhus fever, but a ‘fièvre maligne putride’; he also adds that he failed to observe petechiae in a single instance. The physicians sent by the Government, on the other hand, diagnosed the disease as ‘hospital fever’. Inasmuch as there is no doubt expressed anywhere else regarding the appearance of typhus fever among the Spanish prisoners (Ozanam speaks expressly of the appearance of petechiae on the second, third, or fourth day), it was undoubtedly that disease which broke out in Bourges. Not only the French, but also the English troops were attacked by typhus fever in Spain and Portugal; they are said to have lost 24,930 men in consequence of diseases, and 8,889 men in consequence of battles and skirmishes. The disease was conveyed to England by returning soldiers, but was confined there to a few houses. After the battles of the year 1808, which went against the English, the badly infected English troops were transported on ships in stormy weather to Plymouth, where from January 24, 1808, to January 24, 1809, some 2,427 of them were received into the hospitals. Of that number 824 were suffering from typhus fever, and 1,503 from dysentery; all told, 405 died.[105] CHAPTER VI THE EPIDEMICS OF TYPHUS FEVER IN CENTRAL EUROPE FOLLOWING UPON THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN AND DURING THE WARS OF LIBERATION (1812–14) 1. GENERAL OBSERVATIONS REGARDING TYPHUS FEVER Typhus fever, as a specific disease, was well known to the military physicians during the age of Napoleon, since, as set forth in the previous chapter, it regularly appeared during the numerous Napoleonic wars in the form of widespread epidemics. In France the simple word ‘typhus’ was often used to denote the disease, and the custom still prevails there. In Germany the disease was called infectious nerve fever, war plague, lazaret fever, &c.