of the disease, along with 18,000 of the 20,000 Spanish soldiers within its walls, forcing the city to surrender. After Austerlitz, a bout of the illness struck that Dr. Larrey described in the complex nosological formulation of the day as “a malignant, nervous and putrid hospital fever (adynamicoataxic).” During the epidemic, a Polish officer, Heinrich von Brandt, caught the disease and was taken to a military hospital. “[The dead] were thrown from the windows stark naked,” he wrote, “and they fell, one on top of the other, with a muffled thud just as though they were sacks of corn.”
In 1796, during the siege of Mantua, Italy, the malady, along with malaria, killed or incapacitated 14,000 of Napoleon’s force of 24,000. The French still managed to prevail during the Italian campaign, but afterward one army surgeon reported the cost. “Like an enormous fire [the illness] is sweeping our hospitals,” he wrote. “That mortal plague afflicting all campaigning armies is caused by the filth of these quarters, the lack of fresh air, the negligence of the troops, and the total lack of concern by our own general staffs.”
Public health officials in France knew the disease. Spanish prisoners sent back from the ongoing war there brought the pathogen with them; they were forbidden to fraternize with the local French inhabitants, and after they left the straw they had slept on was burned and their barracks fumigated. The precautions weren’t thorough enough, however: in one hospital, the nuns who nursed the prisoners, the guards, the porters, the gendarmes who guarded the convoys, the medical students, the chaplain, and even the secretary of the War Commissioner—nearly everyone who came in contact with the Spanish patients even for the briefest time—caught the illness. Many of them died.
During the Wars of the First Coalition, while Napoleon was making his name, an especially lethal strain swept through the Prison du Bouffay in Nantes, killing twenty-one of twenty-two sentinels and most of the committee sent to investigate. Even the grave diggers hired to bury the victims succumbed. Any doctor with long experience in France would have been familiar with the disease. In a popular medical journal, a physician wrote in April 1812: “I warn all military physicians not to congregate all their fever patients in a single room by themselves, for few would come forth from such a room alive.”
In its encounters with French society, the pathogen had confirmed further clues about itself: Once entrenched in a population (how it achieved that was still a mystery), it appeared to be highly contagious. And the evidence showed that it was, as the army surgeon suspected, intimately connected with hygiene. Those two simple facts could have given Napoleon’s doctors a key insight into the malady’s nature and radically altered their approach to it, if they had learned the correct lessons from the outbreaks. Those bits of information would, a century and a half later, help to solve the riddle of the disease’s origin, a riddle unraveled by a French doctor at another hospital in another far-flung colony of empire.
C H A P T E R 4
Crossing
T HE FIRST OF N APOLEON’S SOLDIERS CROSSED THE N IEMEN River into Russia on a beautiful summer’s day. Napoleon’s army, the greatest he had ever led, in fact the greatest since the time of the Persian conqueror Xerxes, tramped above the rushing waters that marked the border between Poland and Russian Lithuania on June 24, 1812. Crossing the river was itself the signal, the trigger for war. It would take only hours for the news to reach Tsar Alexander I, reclining in a chair at a party scented by groves of orange trees in bloom, seventy miles to the east.
Anticipation and uncertainty and dreams of riches swirled in the minds of everyone from the emperor to raw privates pulled away from sleepy Normandy farms. The towns in Germany, the natural staging ground for
In 1796, during the siege of Mantua, Italy, the malady, along with malaria, killed or incapacitated 14,000 of Napoleon’s force of 24,000. The French still managed to prevail during the Italian campaign, but afterward one army surgeon reported the cost. “Like an enormous fire [the illness] is sweeping our hospitals,” he wrote. “That mortal plague afflicting all campaigning armies is caused by the filth of these quarters, the lack of fresh air, the negligence of the troops, and the total lack of concern by our own general staffs.”
Public health officials in France knew the disease. Spanish prisoners sent back from the ongoing war there brought the pathogen with them; they were forbidden to fraternize with the local French inhabitants, and after they left the straw they had slept on was burned and their barracks fumigated. The precautions weren’t thorough enough, however: in one hospital, the nuns who nursed the prisoners, the guards, the porters, the gendarmes who guarded the convoys, the medical students, the chaplain, and even the secretary of the War Commissioner—nearly everyone who came in contact with the Spanish patients even for the briefest time—caught the illness. Many of them died.
During the Wars of the First Coalition, while Napoleon was making his name, an especially lethal strain swept through the Prison du Bouffay in Nantes, killing twenty-one of twenty-two sentinels and most of the committee sent to investigate. Even the grave diggers hired to bury the victims succumbed. Any doctor with long experience in France would have been familiar with the disease. In a popular medical journal, a physician wrote in April 1812: “I warn all military physicians not to congregate all their fever patients in a single room by themselves, for few would come forth from such a room alive.”
In its encounters with French society, the pathogen had confirmed further clues about itself: Once entrenched in a population (how it achieved that was still a mystery), it appeared to be highly contagious. And the evidence showed that it was, as the army surgeon suspected, intimately connected with hygiene. Those two simple facts could have given Napoleon’s doctors a key insight into the malady’s nature and radically altered their approach to it, if they had learned the correct lessons from the outbreaks. Those bits of information would, a century and a half later, help to solve the riddle of the disease’s origin, a riddle unraveled by a French doctor at another hospital in another far-flung colony of empire.
C H A P T E R 4
Crossing
T HE FIRST OF N APOLEON’S SOLDIERS CROSSED THE N IEMEN River into Russia on a beautiful summer’s day. Napoleon’s army, the greatest he had ever led, in fact the greatest since the time of the Persian conqueror Xerxes, tramped above the rushing waters that marked the border between Poland and Russian Lithuania on June 24, 1812. Crossing the river was itself the signal, the trigger for war. It would take only hours for the news to reach Tsar Alexander I, reclining in a chair at a party scented by groves of orange trees in bloom, seventy miles to the east.
Anticipation and uncertainty and dreams of riches swirled in the minds of everyone from the emperor to raw privates pulled away from sleepy Normandy farms. The towns in Germany, the natural staging ground for
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