[The epidemic typhus of 1813/14 in the area of lower Franconia].

When Napoleon left for Moscow, in June 1812, he marched at the head of a huge army, perhaps more than half a million men strong. Roughly one fifth of them survived and came back to Germany at the turn of 1812/13. The "Grande Armée" had been subject to open battles and guerilla warfare, but even more to the ravages of hunger and infectious disease - it was epidemic typhus that killed off the soldiers. On their way back to France, the soldiers carried that disease to some areas of Germany, esp. those along the Main river. In late winter of 1813 some parts of Franconia suffered terribly. The epidemic subsided in summer 1813 when the lice - typhus is a louse-born disease - were less and better under control. But again in the winter of 1813/14, after the battle of Leipzig (Oct. 1813), a murderous epidemic of typhus broke out and killed very many people in cities like Wurzburg, Aschaffenburg, and Mainz. Mortality rose to a high percentage. Some contemporary German doctors had a rough idea that the carrier of the disease must be in the clothes. According to very conservative estimates one out of ten Germans fell sick, and ten percent of the sick died of typhus, a quarter of a million out of 23 million people. German historiography normally does not mention this epidemic in history text-books, so this epidemic is rather unknown.