‘Many people stated positively’, says Hufeland,[108] ‘that they contracted the disease almost immediately after they had occupied small, narrow rooms in company with infected French soldiers, or after they had washed their clothes or waited upon them. This frequently happened in small houses that undertook, for a small profit, to shelter invalid soldiers quartered upon the wealthier citizens. Many asserted that they contracted the disease by passing the night in small inns in the towns and villages around Berlin, and on the roads from Königsberg, Danzig, and Frankfurt, and by sleeping on beds or straw which had shortly before been used by infected Frenchmen or Russians. A certain number of men contracted typhus fever by serving as attendants, in order to earn a little money, in the local French military hospital. In this way many of the servants and attendants employed there, as well as numerous surgeons and apothecaries, contracted the disease and subsequently infected the members of their families who brought them home and took care of them, and who, in turn, infected the other inhabitants of the house and of the neighbouring houses.’ Further on, Hufeland adds that only those inmates of the hospital contracted the disease who, as servants and attendants, had been in close and constant contact with the patients. In the years 1813–14 a large number of physicians were carried away by typhus fever; it was estimated at that time that some 500 of them throughout Germany (excluding the surgeons) fell victims to the disease—in Silesia alone 63 physicians died, in Leipzig 17, in Württemberg 17, and in Baden 35.[109] Emphasis was always laid upon the fact that the clothes and other effects of people who had succumbed to typhus fever were highly infectious. The wide prevalence of the disease among the Jewish inhabitants of Vilna was attributed to ignorance or disregard of this fact; for when orders were issued to destroy such clothing, the Jews, out of sheer avarice, disobeyed them. The persons who acquired such effects in this cheap and illicit manner usually paid the penalty themselves; in addition, they did a great deal toward spreading the disease. The military hospitals were also largely responsible for the dissemination of typhus fever; Parenteau-Desgranges[110] called them outright ‘centres de contagion’. The cities in which military hospitals were erected were always severely attacked by the disease. It was generally complained, even by the French physicians, that the French hospitals were poorly arranged and badly managed—even simple cleanliness and competent attendants were lacking. Patients suffering from infectious disease were placed together with others suffering from some mild form of sickness or from a wound, thus giving the infection the best conceivable chance to spread. Let us read how a French physician describes the conditions in Verdun during the severe epidemic of typhus fever that raged there in the years 1792–5:[111]