Weil’s Disease

[NH Civil War Gal]

or leptospirosis. I wonder how many soldiers actually had this and no one was able to diagnose it correctly. Humans can get it from rats. I mention it because I've just read, "I stood guard last night on a government transport loaded with hard tack and sow belly (salt pork). I never saw so many rats, the boat was swarming with them. Of course they had plenty to eat. I counted more than a hundred rat holes in the cracker boxes…."

Vermin urinate as they go on things and obviously they are doing it on the food that soldiers are eating. The field conditions for any of these wars sounds unbelievably filthy - at every level - when you think about it.

This is from "Soldier Boy's Letter to His Father and Mother, 1861-65" by Chauncey Herbert Cooke

 

[JOHN42768]

Another disease I had not heard about. Just recently Gene Hackman's wife died of a disease from mice urine

 

[NH Civil War Gal]

Chauncey is down near Cairo - and I've actually been there, because his next letter describes how he is THRILLED to be back "on top of the big bluff, with clean air" in Columbus, and "away from the rat infested barracks where the rats run over your faces at night."

I'm kind of surprised they didn't have a few dogs down there that liked to catch rats. Talk about disease spreading varmints and Cairo is on the water and rats love water too.

 

[Kurtlg]

Another disease I had not heard about. Just recently Gene Hackman's wife died of a disease from mice urine

It was hantavirus.Bubonic plague is also an issue in the southwest

 

[SWS]

"The assumption that General Hood died of yellow fever [in 1879] is justified, but the possibility cannot be overlooked that Weil's disease, an entity which is clinically indistinguishable, was the cause. An organism morphologically similar to the spirochete of Weil's disease was seen in the kidney sections of a patient dying of so-called yellow fever in the New Orleans epidemic of 1905, a discovery which has led many physicians to entertain the supposition that some of the cases which were diagnosed as yellow fever, especially during epidemics, were in reality Weil's disease."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/30237646

 

[dlofting]

Our dogs are vaccinated for leptospirosis....didn't realize that humans could get it.

 

[lupaglupa]

We are probably more likely to get diseases from dirt and vermin than the soldiers were since we so rarely encounter them. Men who grew up on a farm had probably been exposed to all kinds of dirt and feces. It was the other people and their diseases that they fell sick from. Before the miracle that is vaccinations people who lived in secluded areas had almost no immunity to contagious disease.

 

[Reconstructed Rebel]

So many soldiers write of developing rheumatism. I wonder if the pain and swelling in their joints was caused by rheumatic fever. Rheumatic fever is an inflammatory disease that can develop when strep throat or scarlet fever isn't properly treated with antibiotics.

Two of my mom's sisters had scarlet fever as children and they both had damage to their heart valves as a result, eventually causing their death. Mom's youngest sister died of diphtheria when she was three months old. My dad had whooping cough as a baby and my grandmother told of having to sit day and night with him, using her finger to pull the phlegm out of his throat when he struggled to breath and his lips started to turn blue. (Not meaning to get too graphic).

Doctors in the 1800s had words for diseases that are not used or recognized today, and this makes me wonder if they were describing the side effects of single diseases and just didn't recognize how it was all related.

 

[NH Civil War Gal]

Leptospirosis is caused by an infection with the spirochete bacterium Leptospira and is most often spread through exposure to the urine of infected animals either from direct contact or from contact with soil or water contaminated by the urine.Sep 10, 2024

This is from NIH. Now imagine all those cracker boxes and pork belly covered with rats and having rats swarm over your face at night.

 

[NH Civil War Gal]

Leptospirosis in French Historical Medical Literature: Weil’s Disease or Kelsch’s Disease? - PMC

Early names for leptospirosis often indicate occupational or environmental exposure. Leptospirosis is hard to identify in the tropical setting because of co-circulating diseases. This is not the case in the temperate setting, such as Europe, where ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

In temperate settings, leptospires may have caused a devastating outbreak among Patuxet (Plimouth) Indians in New England in the early 17th C3,11 or in Minorca in 1745.12 Ozanam (1773–1837) mentioned community outbreaks of "epidemic jaundice" in Berlin in 1699 and 1702, in Hungary in 1703 and 1705, in Rome in 1709, and in now-Belgium and the Netherlands in 1719.5,13 Most of the well-documented epidemiological records available on what may be considered to be leptospirosis in Europe, however, were documented by military doctors.

These forefathers of clinical epidemiology were struck by the brutal character of "epidemic jaundice" outbreaks even among healthy adults; they described environmental or occupational exposures leading to jaundice, which bore similarities to "typhoid" or "typhus" but was less lethal and not always febrile.

Sir John Pringle (1707–1782) relates the account of "epidemic jaundice" among British troops in Flanders in 1743.14 Outbreaks and their dynamics were described in Europe, for example, in now-German troops besieging Paris, causing 799 cases among 33,380 Bavarian troops stationed around Paris, in February–May 1870 with an estimated attack rate of 2.4%.5 Many other such epidemics were described elsewhere in Europe and no doubt detailed in other languages.15 But the best-described epidemics—in French medical literature at least—occurred in closed settings with documented denominators.16

 

[13 IL Cav & 64 GA Inf]

or leptospirosis. I wonder how many soldiers actually had this and no one was able to diagnose it correctly. Humans can get it from rats. I mention it because I've just read, "I stood guard last night on a government transport loaded with hard tack and sow belly (salt pork). I never saw so many rats, the boat was swarming with them. Of course they had plenty to eat. I counted more than a hundred rat holes in the cracker boxes…."

Vermin urinate as they go on things and obviously they are doing it on the food that soldiers are eating. The field conditions for any of these wars sounds unbelievably filthy - at every level - when you think about it.

This is from "Soldier Boy's Letter to His Father and Mother, 1861-65" by Chauncey Herbert Cooke

I can't imagine the bad "food" that Civil War soldiers were given at times.

 

[NH Civil War Gal]

I can't imagine the bad "food" that Civil War soldiers were given at times.

Years ago I read in a diary from a brand new Union soldier leaving from New England to go to DC. They were leaving by steamer from Long Island and heading down the coast. It was night and a cook was forking over "meat" into their haversacks. When he eventually got hungry he took it out and promptly slid it into the Atlantic Ocean. It was just a pure lump of fat.

I have a personal disgust of fat and gristle so I can see myself doing the same thing. His eyes were starting to be opened that this army life wasn't going to be all they said it was going to be.

 

[John Winn]

We are probably more likely to get diseases from dirt and vermin than the soldiers were since we so rarely encounter them. Men who grew up on a farm had probably been exposed to all kinds of dirt and feces. It was the other people and their diseases that they fell sick from. Before the miracle that is vaccinations people who lived in secluded areas had almost no immunity to contagious disease.

Your post brought back a memory about the grandfather of my first wife. He was a farm boy and a veteran of WWI and was sent to Haiti in 1920 to combat a smallpox outbreak. He told the story of being examined and the doctor seeing cowpox scars. The doctor laughed and told him he didn't need a vaccination and could just go back to his tent.

Other than what I'd call mild dementia I don't remember him ever being sick in the years I knew him. He'd been shot twice and gassed in the war and lived well into his 90s (got hit by a car in front of his house).

 

[lupaglupa]

There are a number of studies showing that children raised on farms and with pets have stronger immune systems. Modern day children who aren't exposed to dirt and animals are more susceptible to infection.