Rats, lice and history : being a study in biography, which, after twelve preliminary chapters indispensable for the preparation of the lay reader, deals with the life history of typhus fever ... / by Hans Zinsser.
- Hans Zinsser
- Date:
- 1935
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Rats, lice and history : being a study in biography, which, after twelve preliminary chapters indispensable for the preparation of the lay reader, deals with the life history of typhus fever ... / by Hans Zinsser. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![“There was a severe winter, a cold April, a hailstorm in the summer. The wine was scarce and of poor quality. In this year there was plague in the Palatinate, through Saxony and Prussia. In Danzig 12,000 people died in one week. There was a smallpox epidemic in Bohemia; another in Silesia. In Southern Germany there raged the terrible Rawchkrankheit [probably dysentery or typhoid]. There was a famine in Russia accompanied by pestilences of plague and typhus, and in Moscow alone [probably a gross exaggeration] 127,000 people are said to have died of pestilence.” Each year repeats the grim story. We choose another at random. Thus: “In 1613, when the wine was plentiful but sour, the Hungarian disease [typhus] swept across Wiirttemberg and the Tyrol. Haufitweh [typhus] reigned in Magdeburg. There was plague in Regensburg, in Leip¬ zig, in Bohemia and in Austria, whence it spread east¬ ward.” Such is the story year by year until 1618, when the Thirty Years’ War began. The Thirty Years’ War was the most gigantic natural experiment in epidemiology to which mankind has ever been subjected.* * 3 Europe, as we have seen, was a spot map of dysentery which occurred because the wine gave out and the men had to drink water. This was an army of 20,000 men, and the implica¬ tion is that the entire 20,000 drank no water until they were unable to get hold of wine. 3 There is a relatively new method of investigating infectious disease which is called “experimental epidemiology.” It consists in setting up large colonies of mice, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, or other animals sus¬ ceptible to spontaneous infection with some microorganism, and then introducing, into such a colony, under a variety of controlled conditions, one or more infected individuals. In this way the circumstances which](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29826457_0288.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
