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/ https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/03/26/why-dutch-swear-words-are-so-poxy

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