Medical Aspects of Sir John Moore's Corunna Campaign, 1808–1809

Influence of diarrhoeal disease on military and naval campaigns

“…Overall, the mortality from disease amounted to 17%, most of the deaths being caused by fever and dysentery. 6 During the Napoleonic Wars the French armies, both in Egypt and Russia, were decimated by diarrhoeal disease, probably of many different types 7 . The American Civil War (1861±1865) was the last large-scale con¯ict fought before the germ theory of disease gained ground (Joseph Lister described his experiments with carbolic acid antiseptics in 1867) 2 .`Miasmas' and ef¯uvia' were still considered important.…”

Walcheren 1809: a medical catastrophe

“…Taken as a whole, the available sources suggest that Walcheren fever was not a newly discovered killer disease but a lethal combination of old diseases—malaria, typhus, typhoid, and dysentery—acting together in a group of men already debilitated by previous campaigning20 and a life of poverty and drunkenness in the lower reaches of society. The reduced mortality in officers compared with the troops (only 3% compared with over 10%) was probably as much due to their better general health as to the more attentive care they undoubtedly received.…”

Clostridium botulinumSpores Found in Honey from Small Apiaries in Poland

“…Type F is implicated less often, whereas types C and D are rarely associated with this kind of botulism (Smith, 1979;Sharma et al, 2006). Sporadic cases of infection in adults associated with contaminated deep wounds, achlorhydria, gastro-intestinal operations, stagnant loops of the bowel, were also reported (Critchley, 1991). According to Brook (2007) more than 1500 cases of infant botulism have been confirmed in the USA since it was recognised in 1976.…”