Today’s Filthy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Typhus fever is entirely different from typhoid fever. The latter is a water-borne disease caused by a bacillus. Typhus fever is a disease of dirt. The causative organism, Rickettsia prowazekii, belongs to a class of organisms which lies midway between the relatively large bacteria, easily seen under a high-powered microscope and which produced diseases such as typhoid, syphilis, and tuberculosis, and the viruses, which produce such diseases as smallpox and measles and which are so minute that they can be identified only with an electronic microscope. The organism is carried by lice. Lice is often found on animals or in the cracks and crannies of old buildings, but they can also infest unwashed bodies and the seams of dirty clothing.
Rickettsia prowazekii – ain’t it cute?
This is why typhus acquired the name of gaol fever and, since fevers were supposed to be caused by bad smells, this is the reason why English judges customarily would bear small nosegays of sweet-smelling flowers. The disease originated in the filthy prisons and spread from the felon in the dock to the judge upon the bench. Three such ‘assize epidemics’ occurred in the sixteenth century. These epidemics were late incidents in the history of typhus. The origin of the disease remains obscure. One theory holds that it originated in the East as an infection of lice and rats but subsequently became an infection of lice and men. (Of Lice and Men – I think I read that in 10th grade. – DeSpair) Cyprus and the Levant were probably the first focus of spread to Europe, the earliest known severe outbreak being in the Spanish armies of Ferdinand and Isabella during 1489-90.
Since typhus is a campaign and dirt disease, particularly liable to occur in conditions where a number of people are herded closely together, wearing the same clothes for prolonged periods, and lacking means of ensuring bodily cleanliness, it sometimes had profound effects upon the fortunes of war. A remarkable example is the relatively small and localized epidemic which destroyed a French army besieging Naples in July 1528, thus making a decisive contribution to the final submission of Pope Clement VII to Charles V of Spain. Typhus also forced the Imperial armies of Maximilian II to break off the campaign against the Turks in 1566. Soldiers carried typhus fever across Europe during the Thirty Years War of 1618-48 and it was during this period that the disease became firmly established.
Typhus remained endemic in the whole of Europe from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, but it was only in conditions of warfare, extreme poverty or famine that major outbreaks occurred. The United States was not infected until early in the nineteenth century; a great epidemic occurred at Philadelphia in 1837. But the history of typhus is complicated by the existence of more than one form of the disease. ‘True’ typus fever, characterized by high fever, delirium, a crisis, and a blotchy rash, is very dangerous. Other less dangerous variants are Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Brill’s Disease—a mild type which occurred among New York Jews and was described by Nathan Edwin Brill in 1898—and the Trench Fever of the First World War. This last variant, which was very prevalent among German and Allied troops, apparently replaced ‘true’ typhus in the armies it infected, for ‘true’ typhus did not occur among them, though it wrought havoc among the Servs and Russians. After the Russian revolution and the civil war which followed, famine and disease devastated almost the whole country. Approximately 20 million cases of true typhus occurred in European Russia alone between 1917 and 1921, with from 2.5 million to 3 million deaths.
The mode of transmission of typhus by the bite of the infected body louse was first described in 1911. H. da Roche Lima isolated the causative organism in 1916 and named it after an American, Howard Taylor Ricketts, and an Austrian, Stanislaus Joseph von Prowazek, both of whom died while investigating the disease. Since then improvements in hygiene and the use of DDT to kill lice have brought typhus under control, but mystery still surrounds this disease, for it seems that very special conditions are necessary before it will flourish in a virulent form, even when there is gross infestation with lice. Typhus seems to require concomitant malnutrition and sordid living conditions before it will produce a lethal epidemic.
Clipping hair of a boy infested with lice at a bathing station in Warsaw, 1917.
Culled from: Disease in History
Crime Scene Du Jour!
Scene of Dutch Schultz Shooting at the Palace Bar and Grill, Newark New Jersey, 1935
In 1935 Lucky Luciano ordered a hit on fellow gangster Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer and his “aides” after Schultz announced his intention to kill the anti-mob prosecutor Thomas L. Dewey. Luciano feared this murder would draw unwanted attention to the racketeers, so he put out an order to silence Schultz. Along with three other gangsters, Schultz was gunned down in a Newark, New Jersey, restaurant.
Culled from: Police Pictures