In the summer of 430 B. C. a plague which later historians took for typhus killed 300 Athenian knights, 45,000 Athenian citizens, 10,000 Athenian freemen. Survivors lost fingers, toes, eyesight, memory. Athenian life was completely demoralized.
Beginning in 540 A. D. and lasting some 50 years, another plague surged around the Mediterranean Sea. Deaths in Constaninople reached 10,000 a day.
In 1527, typhus accompanied the sack of Rome by Charles V's troops. Wrote Villa, an invading Spaniard: "In Rome no Dells sound; no church is open; no mass is read. There are no Sundays and no holidays. The rich shops of the merchants are used as stables; the most beautiful palaces are devastated. Houses burn and the streets are heaps of manure. The stench of the corpses is dreadful, and in the churches I have seen dead bodies gnawed by dogs. Mercenaries are dicing for heaps of ducats in the streets. I can compare it to nothing that I know of except the destruction of Jerusalem."
Typhus, more than cold or Russian bullets, made Napoleon retreat from Moscow. Cold, hungry soldiers lay in their own filth on rotten straw. According to de Kirckhoff, a corps surgeon, despairing men ate leather and even human flesh.
In 1914 typhus broke out in Serbia. In six months it killed 150,000 Serbs, 30,000 Austrian prisoners. Spreading to Russia, it infected 25,000,000 people, killed 3,000,000. Hindenburg feared to move German troops from the infected Russian border to the Western front.
Such were some of the historic manifestations of the terrifying might of typhus which Harvard's Professor Hans Zinsser, foremost U. S. authority on the disease, details in his Rats, Lice & History, published this week by Little, Brown & Co. Week before publication Dr. Zinsser sailed for France to lecture at the University of Paris.
Most historians consider typhus one of the oldest of human scourges, running back even beyond the Golden Age of Greece. Dr. Zinsser does not agree with them. According to his thesis, the disease developed among wild rats in the Orient, did not reach Europe as a human epidemic until the 15th Century. In the five subsequent centuries. Professor Zinsser calculates that typhus has caused more death and misery than cholera, bubonic plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, or any other human pestilence. Therefore he rates this mass disease as Plague No. 1, born in filth and spread by vermin.
The transmitters of Plague No. 1 are the rat-flea and the human louse. These greedy insects suck in the virus of typhus from the blood of their hosts, pass the disease on at their next feeding point. The viruses of rat and human typhus are slightly different. But when either gets into a human being's blood they cause precisely the same symptoms.
Dr. Zinsser describes the disease as follows: