Regarding the total number of deaths due to typhus fever in Baden no information is available; at all events it was very large. This is shown by the fact that in the last part of 1813 and first part of 1814 no less than thirty-five physicians and thirty surgeons of the first class fell victims to the pestilence.[168]
In November 1813, thousands of scattered French prisoners came to Darmstadt; many of them were suffering from typhus fever, which soon spread throughout the city. Many places in that part of the present Grand Duchy of Hesse which lies south of the Main were severely attacked by the epidemic; as many as 2,000 or 3,000 inhabitants of many places contracted the disease. But by July 5, 1814, it had everywhere disappeared.[169]
5. TYPHUS FEVER ON THE LEFT BANK OF THE RHINE; FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
The continued retreat of the French army passed from Mayence through Metz to Paris, and the route of the retreat was marked by patients left behind. In this way the epidemic of typhus fever was quickly transplanted to the north-eastern part of France. Alsace-Lorraine, the Palatinate, Champagne, and Burgundy were all attacked in succession. The epidemic raged from Kreuznach to Strassburg; the dispersion of the retreating army caused even the smallest villages to suffer, so that the pestilence appeared in Worms, Frankenthal, Spires, Oppenheim, Neustadt-on-the-Hardt, Dürkheim, Landau, Alzey, Trabach, Zweibrücken, Weissenburg, Hagenau, Zabern, and in other places. Mörs (near Frankenthal) was almost completely wiped out.[170] The following places in France are mentioned as having been attacked by the pestilence: Saint-Avold, Courcelles-Chaussy, Mars-la-Tour, Sierck, Cattenom, Pont-à-Mousson, Toul, Nancy, Étain, Verdun, Bar, Longwy, and Sedan. Thouvenel describes the epidemic of typhus fever in Pont-à-Mousson, which broke out in December 1813, when transports of sick soldiers arrived there, and spread to all the surrounding towns and villages; it increased in severity until the middle of March, and by June had almost disappeared. He describes in emotional language the endless succession of wagons that arrived every day:[171]
Who of us will not remember as long as he lives those harrowing scenes, which one cannot describe without shuddering? Who will ever forget those hundreds of wagons filled with unhappy wounded men who had had no medical care since leaving Leipzig; and packed in with them were sick men suffering from dysentery, typhus fever, &c., almost all of them dying of inanition, weakness, and filth, as well as of disease. Those unfortunate men piteously begged only for a place in a hospital already filled with dying men, only to receive in reply a forced refusal. And so they were under the cruel necessity of going further to die, with the result that they infected all the towns and villages along their route, wherever they were granted a generous hospitality.