The following is excerpted from the recently published “Pox, An American History” by Michael Willrich:
“Where soldiers go, plagues follow. Since the age of Alexander, the annals of war had known no truer axiom. Mobilizing armies uprooted young men from great cities and remote villages, previously distinct epidemiological environments, and three them together in crowded camps where the air reeked of waste and the water teemed with the unseen agents of cholera and typhoid. Across the millennia, seasoned generals had fairly expected diseases to take more lives than spears, swords, or guns….
“Beneath the staggering death toll of the American Civil War, in which some 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers perished, lay the familiar but little understood handiwork of microbial pathogens: nearly twice as many soldiers had died from disease as from combat…The Franco-Prussian Wars of 1870-71 unleashed a European pandemic of pox that killed more than 500,000 people….
“After witnessing the plagues and carnage of the devastating Crimean War (1853-56), the Russian surgeon Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogoff concluded, ‘War is a traumatic epidemic.’”
