Typhus: generic disease of the Napoleonic Wars

While historians debate the number of deaths during the Napoleonic Wars, deaths from diseases are recognized as more common than those killed at fight. The figures of the Crimean War will clearly demonstrate this later. Since antiquity, wars carried epidemics and fevers in civilian and military populations, which are linked, for convenience, primarily to typhus. The Napoleonic period made it possible to identify risk factors (promiscuity, unsanitary conditions), a precise clinical description (sudden fever, rash, tuphos) and the recommendation of preventive measures rarely applied. Desgenettes, Inspector General of the Armed Forces Health Service, Percy and then Larrey, chief surgeons of the Grande Armée, were in the front line to demand suitable accommodation from the army commissioners. It was not until 1910 that the American HT Ricketts discovered the bacterium (Rickettsie) from which he died. Treatment is now based on one Doxycycline tablet per day.