FLUXES, FEVERS AND FIGHTING MEN: War and Disease in Ancien Regime Europe 1648-1789

1-221970

This scope of the study includes French army operations in some of its contiguous campaigning theaters, north Italy (1702 and 1734), the Rhineland (1734), Roussillon (1674), possibly Catalonia (1693), and, further afield, Bohemia (1742). The study also includes three case-studies involving the British army that include Ireland (1689), Portugal (1762), Dutch Brabant (1748), and the Rhineland (1743). The outliers are studies of Habsburg operations in and around Belgrade (1717 and 1737), and Russian operations in Crimea (1736).

The proportion of wartime soldiers dying of disease compared to combat injury ran at about 70-75% in armies campaigning in Europe 1648-1789. During this time, field armies doubled in size and regimes usually fought for limited territorial gains, so it was safest to 'occupy, entrench, and wait.'

This study uncovers how many soldiers sickened and died by consulting quantitative data, such as casualty returns and hospital registers, generated by the new state-contract armies which displaced the mercenary hordes of the Thirty Years' War. Includes 30 b/w maps and graphs.