Non-Fiction Books:

Fluxes, Fevers and Fighting Men

War and Disease in Ancien Regime Europe 1648-1789
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Description

The proportion of wartime soldiers dying of disease as against combat injury, ran at about 70-75 percent in armies campaigning in Europe in the century and a half (1648-1789) between the end of the Thirty Years War and the French Revolution. During this time, field armies doubled in size and regimes usually fought for limited territorial gains, so it was safest to 'occupy, entrench, and wait'. Consequently, this was an era of massive and protracted encampments: the Christian army that sat down before Belgrade in 1717 had more mouths than any city within 500 miles, but lacked basic urban amenities like regular markets, wells, privy pits, and night soil collectors. Yet the impact of sickness on military operations has been neglected. This study uncovers how many soldiers sickened and died by consulting quantitative data, such as casualty returns and hospital registers, generated by the new state-contract armies which displaced the mercenary hordes of the Thirty Years' War. As plague began to recede from Europe, this study explains what exactly were these 'fluxes and fevers' that remained to afflict European armies in wartime and argues that they formed a single seasonal continuum that peaked in late summer. The isolation and incarceration of the military hospital characterised the response of the new armies to 'disorder' and to revivified notions of contagion. However, the hospital often prolonged the late summer morbidity/mortality spike into mid-winter by generating 'hospital fever' or typhus, the lice-borne disease that erupted whenever the cold, wet, hungry, transient, and unwashed huddled together. The cure was the disease. This scope of the study includes French army operations in some of its contiguous campaigning theatres, north Italy (1702 and 1734), the Rhineland (1734), Roussillon (1674), possibly Catalonia (1693), and, further afield, Bohemia (1742). The study also includes three case-studies involving the British army that include Ireland (1689), Portugal (1762), Dutch Brabant (1748), and the Rhineland (1743). The outliers are studies of Habsburg operations in and around Belgrade (1717 and 1737), and Russian operations in Crimea (1736). 30 b/w maps and graphs

Author Biography:

The author is a lecturer in history at the National University of Ireland Galway. He has researched and written on Irish history in the seventeenth century and on military history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His books on military topics include Battle of the Boyne 1690 (2003) and Confederate Catholics at War 1642-49.(2003) His articles on military subjects include 'The Irish Brigade'. Eighteenth-Century Ireland Iris An Dá Chultúr, (2016), 'Namur Citadel, 1695: A Case Study in Allied Siege Tactics'. War In History, (2011), 'Unhappy Campers: Dundalk (1689) and After'. Journal of Conflict Archaeology (2007) 'War and Population', Irish Economic And Social History, (1998). He has co-edited (with Keith Sidwell) Poema de Hibernia, a Jacobite Epic on the Williamite Wars. (2017), (with David Edwards and Clodagh Tait.) The Age of Atrocity (Four Courts: Dublin, 2007) and edited Conquest and Resistance: Irish Warfare in the Seventeenth Century (2001).
Release date NZ
July 15th, 2019
Audiences
  • General (US: Trade)
  • Professional & Vocational
Illustrations
30 b/w maps & graphs
Pages
176
ISBN-13
9781911628514
Product ID
28309065

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