Disease
Armies and refugees have usually lost more people to illness than to weapons.
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In the Knowledge Base
- AntisepsisKilling or holding back the germs in a wound and on everything that touches it, the practice that from the late 1860s began to cut deaths from infection after surgery.
- Camp feverEpidemic typhus, a louse-borne bacterial disease that followed armies, prisons, ships and refugee columns wherever people were cold, crowded and unable to wash or change clothes.
- DysenteryAn infection of the bowel that causes bloody diarrhoea, fever and dehydration, and has followed armies wherever latrines, water and food were not kept apart.
- GangreneTissue death from lost blood supply or infection. Before antibiotics it turned survivable wounds into amputations, and on the Western Front gas gangrene became one of surgery's central problems.
- SmallpoxA viral disease of high fever and pustular rash. In 1520 it reached Tenochtitlán, a year after Cortés first entered the city, and killed large numbers of people who had never met it.