Thread by @natterjee

So far our #10plagues have included lifestock pestilence & swarms of 🦟. In Exodus, the third plague brings the humble louse—bearer of typhus, a mostly forgotten disease. But "war fever" haunted the (early) modern military state, from armies + jails to borders + refugee camps. 1/

Typhus (not to be confused with typhoid) is the work of Rickettsia bacteria, named for a scientist they killed. Its epidemic form travels in 💩 of the body louse, which eats only human blood. Meaning "hazy", typhus brings spots, fingertip gangrene +a delirious "besotted" look. 2/

When they’ve actually noticed it, scholars have depicted "General Typhus" as the world's greatest military leader, nemesis of Charles V and Napoleon. But typhus undermines that portrait gallery view of history. It was a disease of squalor, unhappy crowds, and state violence. 3/

Typhus has been blamed for the plague of 430 BC that killed ⅓ of Athenians, weakening the upstart power during the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides survived to deliver the first great Western historical account of war & disease. Boris Johnson’s hero Pericles was not so lucky. 4/

But for once it may have been innocent. Typhus often kills its host (itself a tempting war metaphor...), an antagonism that suggests the pathogen-vector relationship is recent. As biologist Hans Zinsser wrote in his pioneering posthuman "biography" Rats, Lice & History (1935): 5/

Legend has it that the Crusades brought typhus to Europe from the Middle East. The C19th French historian Michelet was less convinced of an external origin, noting Christianity's veneration of filth. The Middle Ages' war "against the flesh and all cleanliness bore its fruits". 6/

More than urbanisation or trade, Europe's newly huge—and unwashed—armies opened the door. The louse's first world-historical intervention gave Charles V a miraculous victory at Naples in 1528, killing 20,000 besieging Frenchmen to solidify a "realm on which the sun never set". 7/

"Armies of pestilence" were a symbol of God's capricious favour, as Shakespeare's Richard II knew. In turn, typhus thwarted Charles's attempt to bring Protestants to heel in 1552. Yet Geoffrey Parker's 760p new bio mentions typhus only twice—once more than the king's scrotal itch

Typhus's other longstanding nickname was "gaol fever". It killed ¼ of inmates and many magistrates in England's filthy, overcrowded prisons—the "Black Assizes" of Cambridge, Exeter, Taunton & London. When 300 died in Oxford in 1577, locals blamed a curse by one Rowland Jenkes. 9/

Meanwhile, typhus—aka "tabardillo" (red cloak)—set sail with smallpox + measles. These "virgin-soil epidemics" devastated the New World: indigenous populations declined by 90%. At least 22 typhus epidemics struck Mexico up to C20th, usually in times of drought & dislocation. 10/

Back home, the diseases also flourished together during the C17th Little Ice Age, with its disrupted harvests & endless warfare. Typhus especially enjoyed the 30 Years War (1618–48), a strikingly pointless & brutal conflict even by Europe's standards that killed 4–12 million. 11/

Mercenaries went marauding when demobilized w/o pay each winter, ransacking farms and pouring excrement down villagers' throats to make them give up food. ~⅓ German population died. The resulting lag perhaps shaped united Germany’s world-wrecking empire envy 250 years later. 12/

Bar mass witch burnings, arguably the most creative legacy of this overlap between religious wars + disease may have been the embrace by the Calvinistic Dutch of new, worldly swearwords. In Amsterdam you can still be told to "typhus off" (optyfussen). 13/
economist.com/europe/2020/03…

⏩ 1812: Napoleon assembled the greatest & most multinational European army yet. 680,000 men invaded Russia. Within 8 weeks ⅓ were lost, largely to typhus. The Grande Armée was broken long before the famously bitter Russian winter. 50,000 made it back, typhus in their wake. 14/n

In Ireland, typhus killed 65,000 in 1817, the Year Without a Summer. It returned during the Famine, decimating whole villages. Fleeing in the notorious coffin ships, migrants brought "Irish fever" to Liverpool & then westwards. Canada quarantined them in deadly fever sheds. 15/n

In the US, "Irish" became a playground insult. In 1858 Staten Islanders burned the Irish-filled Quarantine Hospital to the ground. Stereotypes of disease & whiskey-sozzled funeral wakes dogged Irish Americans for decades, until they managed to trade up into white chauvinism. 16/n

Typhus was becoming a humiliating disease of the Old World fringes, ominously overladen with antisemitism. In 1892 stricken Russian Jews were quarantined on the East River, creating panic. Like Turkey and Marseilles, @nytimes called for the US to shut its doors to "Hebrews". 17/n

Uplifting news arrived in 1904–5: the Russo-Japanese War was the first major conflict in which fighting killed more soldiers than disease. Huzzah! 🇬🇧🇺🇸 observers credited Japan for developing "aseptic fighting", led by a rationalised, scientific permanent army medical corps. 18/n

Military reorganization accelerated during WWI, both on the front & international borders. Delousing stations arrived (tho "cooties" still spread milder trench fever, maybe outcompeting typhus). In El Paso Mexican migrants rioted vs degrading typhus baths + racial profiling. 19/n

Further east a typhus epidemic in Serbia killed >150,000; its army ceased fighting. Already seen as backward & "Oriental", Serbia became a huge experiment for disease research. Allies sent $ + experts to oversee mass sanitary measures, while tightening their own quarantines. 20/n

Revolutionary Russia was not so lucky: typhus killed 3 million. "Either socialism will defeat the louse," said Lenin, "or the louse will defeat socialism."

Russia, wrote a US doctor, "had become a feeder of evil, not only political but physical, for the rest of the world". 21/n

The link between lice, race theory, and the technocratic new apparatus of war was tightening. German scholars argued that wartime epidemics undermined eugenics by killing soldiers. Controlling typhus—Judenfieber—became a Nazi fixation. Zyklon-B, after all, was a lice-killer. 22/n

Europe's last huge wave of typhus victims—among them Anne Frank—was the product of this murderous state apparatus. "One louse, your death!" ran a Nazi slogan, as the disease ravaged ghettoes and concentration camps.

Typhus remains a favourite alibi for Holocaust deniers. 23/n

With that final spasm of horror, antibiotics and new rules for international travel finally stopped the bacterium. A new chemical powder helped soldiers eliminate their lice.

That magic powder? The pesticide DDT, agent provocateur of the modern environmental movement. 24/n

Epidemic typhus had its final flourish during Burundi's civil war in the 1990s. More recent scrub & murine typhus cases are down to different pathogens/pests. They dogged soldiers in the Vietnam War, and now LA's huge homeless population. Flying squirrels are a major carrier 25/n

Today, typhus all but forgotten, politicians talk of a "war on disease". But typhus's real vector was the apparatus of Europe's penal-military states—just as bloodthirsty as lice. There's no social distancing in prison cells or navy ships, army barracks or refugee camps.

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