A stranger to our camps: Typhus in American history

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Volumn 80, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 269-290

  Humphreys, Margaret ^a  

^a DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

American Revolution; Body louse; Civil War; Disease evolution; Military medicine; Relapsing fever; Typhus

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745796399     PISSN: 00075140     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2006.0058     Document Type: Review

References (111)

1. Charles Smart, The Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War, 10 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1888; reprint Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot, 1991), 5: 324, 331.
2. Mirko Grmek, History of AIDs: Emergence and Origin of a Modern Pandemic, trans. Russell C. Maulitz and Jacalyn Duffin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
3. Alfred J. Saah, "Rickettsia prowazekii (Epidemic or Louse-Borne Typhus)," in Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, ed. Gerald L. Mandell, John E. Bennett, and Raphael Dolin (Philadelphia: Churchill Livingstone, 2000), pp. 2050-53.
4. Alfred J. Saah, "Rickettsia prowazekii (Epidemic or Louse-Borne Typhus)," in Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, (2000), pp. 2050-53. Ibid.
5. Alfred J. Saah, "Rickettsia prowazekii (Epidemic or Louse-Borne Typhus)," in Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, (2000), pp. 2050-53. Ibid.
6. Nathan Brill identified cases of mild typhus-like fevers among elderly Jewish immigrants living in louse-free surroundings, and published his results in 1910-11: Nathan E. Brill, "Pathological and Experimental Data Derived from a Further Study of an Acute Infectious Disease of Unknown Origin," Amer. J. Med. Sci., 1911, 142: 196-218.
7. Hans Zinsser and colleagues further clarified the identity of this disorder in the 1930s: Hans Zinsser, "The Rickettsia Diseases: Varieties, Epidemiology and Geographical Distribution," Amer. J. Hygiene, 1937, 25: 430-63.
8. Saah, "Rickettsia prowazekii" (n. 3). On the American flying squirrel as a reservoir for typhus, see the last section of this paper.
9. J. Stephen Dumler and David H. Walker, "Rickettsia typhi (Murine Typhus)," in Mandell et al., Principles and Practice (n. 3), pp. 2053-55.
10. Jan O. Andersson and Siv Andersson, "A Century of Typhus, Lice, and Rickettsia," Res. Microbiol., 2000, 151: 143-50;
11. M. P. McLeod et al., "Complete Genome Sequence of Rickettsia Typhi and Comparison with Sequences of Other Rickettsiae," J. Bacter., 2004, 186: 5842-55.
12. Patrick A. Buxton, The Louse: An Account of the Lice Which Infest Man, Their Medical Importance, and Control (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1946), p. 83.
13. Erwin Ackerknecht, History and Geography of the Most Important Diseases (New York: Hafner, 1965), p. 33.
14. Francisco Guerra, "Origen y efectos demográficos del tifo en el México colonial," Colon. Lot. Amer. Hist. Rev., 1999, 8: 273-319.
15. Donald B. Cooper, Epidemic Disease in Mexico City, 1761-1813: An Administrative, Social, and Medical Study (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965).
16. See, for example, Zinsser, "Rickettsia Diseases" (n. 6);
17. H[erman] Mooser, "Tabardillo, an American Variety of Typhus," J. Infect. Dis., 1929, 44: 186-93.
18. On the recent distribution of typhus in Mexico, see Rudolfo Acuna-Soto et al., "Murine Typhus in Mexico City," Trans. Ray. Soc. Trop. Med. & Hygiene, 2000, 94: 45;
19. V. E. Alcantara et al., "Typhus Group Rickettsiae Antibodies in Rural Mexico," Emerg, Infect. Dis., 2004, 10: 549-51.
20. To complicate matters further, a third strain of rickettsiae, R. felis, found primarily in cats, opossums, and their fleas, can also infect humans: see Abdu F. Azad et al., "Flea-Borne Rickettsioses: Ecological Considerations," Emerg. Infect. Dis., 1997, 3: 1-12.
21. See, e.g., the tabardillo entries in Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary (Philadelphia: Saunders, 2000);
22. Taker's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary (Philadelphia: Davis, 2001);
23. Stedman's Medical Dictionary (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2000);
24. Butterworth's Medical Dictionary (London: Butterworth, 1978);
25. Blakiston's Gould Medical Dictionary (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979);
26. International Dictionary of Medicine and Biology (New York: Wiley, 1986).
27. Acuna-Soto et al., "Murine Typhus" (n. 14);
28. Alcantara et al., "Typhus Group" (n. 14).
29. Victoria A. Harden, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever: History of a Twentieth-Century Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
30. Alan M. Kraut, Goldberger's War: The Life and Work of a Public Health Crusader (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003).
31. Kenneth R. Maxcy, "Endemic Typhus of the Southeastern United States: The Reaction of the White Rat," Pub. Health Rep., 1929, 44: 1935-43;
32. R. E. Dyer, "A Virus of the Typhus Type Derived from Fleas Collected from Wild Rats," Pub. Health Rep. ibid., 1931, 46: 334-38;
33. Norman H. Topping and R. E. Dyer, "Apparent Recent Extension of Typhus in the United States," Amer. J. Trop. Med., 1943, 23: 37-42;
34. J. Stephen Dumler, Jeffrey P. Taylor, and David H. Walker, "Clinical and Laboratory Features of Murine Typhus in South Texas, 1980 through 1987," JAMA, 1991, 266: 1365-70.
35. Robert Robertson, Observations on the Jail, Hospital, or Ship Fever (London: Murray, 1783), describes his experience with typhus as a surgeon aboard British ships employed in America during the revolution.
36. General Greene's Orders, 28 July 1776, in The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, ed. Richard K. Showman, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 1: 267-68.
37. Nathanael Greene to George Washington, 15 August 1776, The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, ibid., 1: 287-88;
38. John Morgan, A Vindication of His Public Character in the Station of Director-General of the Military Hospitals, and Physician in Chief of the American Army (Boston: Powers and Willis, 1777), pp. 107-8.
39. Theodore E. Woodward, "Typhus Verdict in American History," Trans. Amer. Clin. Climat. Assoc., 1970, 82: 1-8, attributes the illness to typhus.
40. Oscar Reiss, Medicine and the American Revolution: How Diseases and Their Treatments Affected the Colonial Army (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998), p. 188.
41. Benjamin Rush, "The Result of Observations Made upon the Diseases which Occurred in the Military Hospitals of the United States, during the Revolutionary War between Great Britain and the United States," in Medical Inquiries and Observations, ed. Benjamin Rush, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1815; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1972), 1: 145-50, on p. 149.
42. Benjamin Rush, "Outlines of the Phenomena of Fever," in Rush, Medical Inquiries (n. 24), 3:1-36, on p. 19.
43. Benjamin Rush, "Outlines of the Phenomena of Fever," Medical Inquiries. Ibid., p. 27.
44. Benjamin Rush, "Outlines of the Phenomena of Fever," Medical Inquiries (n. 24), 3. p. 27. Ibid. (italics in original).
45. W. W. Gerhard, "On the Typhus Fever, which Occurred at Philadelphia in the Spring and Summer of 1836; Illustrated by Clinical Observation at the Philadelphia Hospital; Showing the Distinction between this Form of Disease and Dothinenteritis, or the Typhoid Fever, with Alteration in the Follicles of the Small Intestine," Amer. J. Med. Sci., 1837, 19: 289-322.
46. Dale C. Smith, "Gerhard's Distinction between Typhoid and Typhus and Its Reception in America, 1833-1860," Bull. Hist. Med., 1980, 34: 368-85.
47. On the mutability of typhus in 1881, see Henry E. Branin, "The History, Origin, etc. of the Epidemic of Typhus Fever at the Camden Co. Alms-house," Trans. Med. Soc. New Jersey, 1881, 115: 216-34.
48. Joseph J. Woodward promoted the new designation "typho- malarial" in his Outline of the Chief Camp Diseases of the United States Armies as Observed During the Present War (Philadelphia, 1863; reprint New York: Hafner, 1964).
49. Dale C. Smith chronicles the history of this hybrid diagnosis, and further exposes the nineteenth-century medical confusion over spotted fevers, in "The Rise and Fall of Typhomalarial Fever," J. Hist. Med. & Allied Sci., 1982, 37: 182-220, 287-321.
50. Vincent J. Cirillo describes the investigation of camp diseases, especially typhomalaria, in his book Bullets and Bacilli: The Spanish-American War and Military Medicine (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004). A commission headed by Walter Reed concluded that in almost all cases, the correct diagnosis was typhoid fever.
51. Henry Grafton Clark, Ship Fever, So Called; Its History, Nature, and Best Treatment (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850), p. 1.
52. A. B. Hawke to Sir, 16 October 1847, British Parliamentary Papers, Correspondence and Other Papers Relating to Canada and to Immigration in the Provinces, 1847-48, orig. vol. 47, new vol, 17 (rpt. Shannon, Ire.: Irish University Press, 1969), pp. 19-20.
53. Daniel Drake described the Canadian epidemic in "The Irish Immigrants' Fever," Boston Med. & Surg. J., 1847, 37: 149-57.
54. Arthur L. Gelston and Thomas C. Jones, "Typhus Fever: Report of an Epidemic in New York City in 1847," J. Infect. Dis., 1977, 136: 813-21.
55. See also "Typhus Fever in New York," Boston Med. & Surg. J., 1848, 38: 66;
56. John H. Griscom, "Summary of, and Observations upon, the Medical Practice of the New York Hospital, in the Months of July, August, and September, 1847," New York J. Med., 1847, 9: 347-54.
57. Report of the Select Committee of the Senate of the United States on the Sickness and Mortality on Board Emigrant Ships (Washington, D.C.: Beverley Tucker, 1854), p. 55.
58. E. Harold Hinman, "History of Typhus Fever in Louisiana," Amer, J. Pub. Health, 1936, 26: 1117-24.
59. George Rosen, "Tenements and Typhus in New York City, 1840-1875," Amer. J. Pub. Health, 1972, 62: 590-93.
60. Stephen Smith, The City That Was (New York, 1911; rpt. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Reprint, 1973), p. 36.
61. Stephen Smith, The City That Was, Ibid., pp. 88-113.
62. V[ictor] C. Vaughan, "History and Epidemiology of Typhus Fever," "JAMA, 1915, 64: 1805-10.
63. Smart, Medical and Surgical History (n. 1), 5: 324.
64. Joseph Jones, "Investigations upon the Diseases of the Federal Prisoners Confined in Camp Sumpter, Andersonville, Ga.," in Contributions Relating to the Causation and Prevention of Disease and to Camp Diseases, ed. Austin Flint (New York: Published for the U.S. Sanitary Commission by Kurd and Houghton, 1867), pp. 469-655, quotation on p. 600.
65. On Andersonville, see William Marvel, Andersonville: The Last Depot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
66. Jones, "Investigations" (n. 41), pp. 600-601.
67. Jones, "Investigations", Ibid., p. 643.
68. Roberts Bartholow, "Camp Fevers - Remittent, Typhoid, Typho-malarial or Malarial Typhoid, Common Continued, and Mountain Fever," in Flint, Contributions (n. 41), pp. 195-217;
69. K. Codell Carter, The Rise of Causal Concepts of Disease (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
70. Smart, Medical and Surgical History (n. 1), 5: 268-69, 324-25.
71. Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War: Natural Biological Warfare in 1861-1865 (Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 1968), p. 15.
72. C. R. Agnew, "Preliminary Report of the Operations of the U.S. Sanitary Commission in North Carolina, March, 1865. Sanitary Commission Report # 87," in Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, nos. 61-95, 2 vols. (New York: U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1866), 2: 7.
73. C. R. Agnew, "Preliminary Report of the Operations of the U.S. Sanitary Commission in North Carolina, March, 1865. Sanitary Commission Report # 87," in Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, nos. 61-95, (1866), 2: 7. Ibid.
74. The Herald of the Union, a federally run Wilmington newspaper that first appeared on 28 February 1865, likewise reported on the pitiful condition of the released prisoners. The paper says little about the subsequent epidemic, although there are references to military orders regarding street-cleaning crews, and demands that homeowners clean up their grounds, which suggests that the tool of sanitation was being brought to bear against an epidemic enemy. See editions of 2 March, 13 March, 17 March, 21 March, and 1 April 1865.
75. B. F. Booth, Dark Days of the Rebellion, or Life in Southern Military Prisons: Libby and Salisbury, 1864-1865 (Indianola, Iowa: Booth, 1897), pp. 327-28.
76. Smart, Medical and Surgical History (n. 1), 5: 331-32.
77. Daniel Hand, "Reminiscences of an Army Surgeon," Glimpses of the Nation's Struggle, 1887, 1: 276-307, quotation on p. 305.
78. Smart, Medical and Surgical History (n. 1), 5: 331-32.
79. "Daniel W. Hand, M.D.," Trans. Minn. State Med. Soc., 1889, 21: 234-39. My thanks to Leonard Wilson for drawing my attention to this obituary and providing other information about Hand and continued fever diagnosis in this era.
80. Agnew, "Preliminary Report" (n. 48), p. 11.
81. Smart, Medical and Surgical History (n. 1), 5: 331-32.
82. George Lyman, quoted in Medical and Surgical History, ibid., 5: 333-34.
83. William P. Macarthur, "Medical History of the Famine," in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845-52, ed. I. R. Dudley and T. Desmond Williams (New York: New York University Press, 1957), pp. 263-315.
84. Willy Burgdorfer, "The Epidemiology of Relapsing Fevers," in The Biology of Parasitic Spirochetes, ed. Russell C. Johnson (NewYork: Academic Press, 1976), pp. 191-200;
85. A. D. M. Bryceson et al., "Louse Borne Relapsing Fever: A Clinical and Laboratory Study of 62 Cases in Ethiopia and a Reconsideration of the Literature," Quart. J. Med., 1970, 39: 129-70. I thank Powel Kazanjian, University of Michigan, for his thoughts on this question.
86. Thomas McCrae, "Typhus Fever," in Modem Medicine, Its Theory and Practice, ed. William Osier (Philadelphia: Lea, 1907), pp. 231-44.
87. Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 16.
88. Annual Report of the Board of Health of the Health Department of the City of New York for the Year Ending December 31, 1892 (New York: Brown, 1894), p. 30.
89. Howard Markel, When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America since 1900 and the Fears They Have Unleashed (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), pp. 111-40.
90. Charles Armstrong, "typhus Fever on the San Juan Indian Reservation, 1920 and 1921," Pub. Health Rep., 1922, 37: 685-93, quotation on p. 685.
91. Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History: A Bacteriologist's Classic History of Mankind's Epic Struggle to Conquer the Scourge of Typhus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), pp. 290-92, 298, quotation on p. 298.
92. Dr. Keeney quoted in Smart, Medical and Surgical History (n. 1), 5: 51.
93. Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1997).
94. Buxton, Louse (n. 10), p. 43.
95. Markel, When Germ Travel (n. 63), p. 117.
96. Acuna-Soto et al., "Murine Typhus" (n. 14).
97. Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the "Immigrant Menace" (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 34.
98. Ke Cheung Kim, Harry D. Pratt, and Chester J. Stojanovich, The Sucking Lice of North America: An Illustrated Manual for Identification (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986);
99. Joanna Ibarra, "Lice (Anoplura)," in Medical Insects and Arachnids, ed. Richard P. Lane and Roger W. Crosskey (London: Chapman and Hall, 1993), pp. 517-28.
100. L. W. Hackett, Malaria in Europe: An Ecological Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1937).
101. On the typhus outbreak in Poland and the American response, see Alfred E. Cornebise, Typhus and Doughboys: The American Polish Typhus Relief Expedition, 1919-1921 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982);
102. Gaines M. Foster, "Typhus Disaster in the Wake of War: The American-Polish Relief Expedition, 1919-1920," Bull. Hist. Med., 1981, 55: 221-32.
103. S. Hurt Wolbach, John L. Todd, and Francis W. Palfrey, The Etiology and Pathology of Typhus: Being the Main Report of the Typhus Research Commission of the league of Red Cross Societies to Poland (Cambridge: League of Red Cross Societies at the Harvard University Press, 1922).
104. H. da Rocha-Lima, "Beobachtungen bei Flecktyphusläusen," Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropen-Hygiene, 1916, 20: 17-31;
105. da Rocha-Lima, "On the Etiology of Typhus Fever," in Selected Papers on the Pathogenic Rickettsiae, ed. Nicholas Hahon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 74-78.
106. Wolbach, Todd, and Palfrey, Etiology (n. 75), p. 49.
107. F. M. Bozeman et al., "Epidemic Typhus Rickettsiae Isolated from Flying Squirrels," Nature, 1975, 255: 545-47.
108. Mary G. Reynolds et al., "Flying Squirrel-Associated Typhus, United States," Emerg. Infect. Dis., 2003, 9: 1341-43, quotation on p. 1341.
109. Mary G. Reynolds et al., "Flying Squirrel-Associated Typhus, United States," Emerg. Infect. Dis., 2003, 9: 1341-43, Ibid.
110. See also Cecilia G. Moron etal., "Phylogenetic Analysis of the ROMPB Genes of Rickettsia Felis and Rickettsia Prowazekii European-Human and North American Flying-Squirrel Strains," Amer. J. Trop. Med. Hygiene, 2000, 62: 598-603.
111. Robert F. Massung et al., "Epidemic Typhus Meningitis in the Southwestern United States," Clin. Infect. Dis., 2001, 32: 979-82.