“With the ancient Athenians, when soldiers fell in battle, it was the custom to collect them into tents, where they lay for a few days, to ensure recognition. Each tribe then conveyed their dead in cypress shells to the ceramicos, or places of public burning, an empty hearse following behind, in memory of the missing.” The first epidemic of spotted fever on record occurred in Spain, in 1490, and was due to the emanations arising from the decaying bodies which had been left unburied on the battle-ground. In 1796 (according to Desgenettes), a military surgeon by the name of Vaidy supervised the burial of the soldiers and horses that had been killed in a combat near Nuremberg. While the work was in progress, he was attacked by colic and nausea, and afterwards suffered for several days from a severe dysentery. His horse, after having been tortured by severe abdominal pains, died on the evening of the day when he was taken sick. Persons who were with Vaidy complained of the same symptoms as he. During the campaign in Russia in 1812 many of the French soldiers who perished in the disastrous retreat were burned by the enemy. After the battle of Waterloo 4000 bodies were reduced to ashes on funeral piles of resinous wood on the field of carnage. The ravages of the typhus fever in the armies battling during the Crimean War are yet well remembered, and were too great to be easily forgotten. An eye-witness (Trusen) of the siege of Sebastopol reported at the time that: “Those who were but lately our brave soldiers have become greater enemies of their successors in arms than the Russians themselves. Barely, and sometimes not at all, covered by earth, their bodies emit a pestilential miasma, which kills far better than powder and bullet, and is more reliable than a gun. A bishop has been sent out to consecrate the trenches in which the dead are piled up, yet the infection will resist consecration and holy water. Unfortunately, the danger does not come from our own troops alone. The wind carries the emanations of the Russian dead into our intrenchments. We besiege Sebastopol, but pestilence besieges us. The same Frenchmen who came to our rescue with their sabres now poison us by their putrefaction. Animal remains also vitiate the air. The cadaver of the noble battle-horse that carried its rider bravely through the day of Balaklava now lies in the road, and threatens the victorious dragoon who rode upon it with an inevitable fate. Burial-ground and camp adjoin each other. Where the soldier fought and fell is his grave, which is seldom far from the tents of the surviving.” During the expedition to Morea, the French made intrenchments in a cemetery outside of Patras. All those who were ordered into the trenches experienced first malarial symptoms, and were finally attacked by typhoid fever. The cholera mowed down more soldiers in the war between Austria and Prussia, in 1866, than the missiles of either army.