Is there any statistical data on disease in the trenches?

I would like to know which diseases were most commonly found amongst the men serving in France. Perhaps, the first ten or so.

DickW

Well bingo, we could start with Trench Foot, Rats carrying all kind of diseases, Lice.
Joe

I have just found the service records for a relative of a friend. He was invalided out due to nephritis caused by the climate during the winter of 1915-16 in France. I would be interested to know if this is one of the common diseases of the trenches

Trench Fever

http://www.vlib.us/medical/liceand.htm


Caryl

Enteric Fever (Typhoid)
Rheumatic Fever
Measles
Mumps
TB
Dysentery
Malaria
Scabies.

Loads of cases of Nephritis and Frostbite

Their is a volume in the British Official History medical series that covers covers medical & casualty statistics and this (available as a reprint) should offer some useful stats on sickness and disease.

Don't forget that in some theatres malaria and dysentry were very common problems even though they were not so common on the Western Front.

Wimeraux hospital records make regular references to dealing with Enteric Fever - however there is no way to tell if they caught this in hospital or bought it back wth 'em from the front.

My sister who was a nurse says that because Enteric is remarkably contagious and so they'd have needed to monitor and record it.

In its very nature [being contagious] it can, I suppose, work both ways. Have a look at this post [#199]

For lice there is a decent downloadable thesis on the Centre for First World War Studies web site.

They varied from year to year, but from the Official History, Casualties and Statistics, first 1916 [France and Flanders only]:

1. Venereal disease
2. Frostbite and trench foot
3. Nephritis
4. Dysentery
5. Rubella (German Measles, later known as Rose Measles)
6. Mumps
7. Enteric Fever (Typhoid and paratyphoid)
8. Tuberculosis
9. Measles
10. Pneumonia

And 1918:

1. Venereal disease
2. Dysentery
3. Frost bite and trench foot
4. Nephritis
5. Malaria [not sure where so much malaria came from, but that's what it says]
6. Mumps
7. Lobar Pneumonia
8. Diphtheria
9. Jaundice
10. (Joint) Measles/Tuberculosis

In order to maintain the will to live, I might have mis-read the occasional figure (just in case anyone else checks and comes up with a different answer!)

Sue

Nice to see that the old estaminets kept the social contagion at the top of the league year after year
Enteric fever was largely caused by poor hygene (contact with feces), occasionally by flying insects that fed on feces, and spread through contamination by the infected. Army had isolation hospitals to deal with it; e.g., Addington Park. Antony

My guess is Salonika and Palestine

Sue
Are your figures for WW1 as a whole or just the WF? Malaria was a major problem in Salonika, East Africa, Mespot and to a lesser extent other theatres including Palestine, Yemen etc. Moreover men who had recovered from it and returned to fight in Europe could come down with it again (and again). As some one who has had the beastly thing (caught in Nigeria) and come down with it again in Muscat, Brighton and Jeddah I can testify to this.

VD perhaps ought to be classed as a disease of the army rather than the trenches. It might be found there but (unless there is a whole new chapter of WW1 history to be written) I'm sure it was not usual to catch it there. It would be common away from the WF.

I'm sorry - I was trying to multi-task (cooking tea) at the same time, and failed to mention that these figures are for France and Flanders only, and exclude Indian troops, who seemed to get a different set of illnesses. I've now edited the former post. But that's why I wondered about so many cases of malaria. I suppose they were men who had contracted it in other theatres, and then had relapses in F&F. I didn't think that malaria was not endemic in Northern France at that time.

Sue

I can post the figures for other theatres if anyone is interested - there are just so many of them it's hard to know what to pick out.

Sue

Sue
Im surprised Spanish Flu doe not come into the top ten in 1918.
Glen

Yes, I'm sure you're absolutely right, and reading more carefully the statistics do seem to be very confusing. Under 'non-battle casualties' those figures (for 1918) are headed:

Table 17. Principal Recorded Causes of Admission to Hospital of British and Dominion Troops in France, 1918, with Deaths and Ratios per 1,000 of ration strength.

Which seems to be fairly straightforward. The top ten of these are as I gave, with Pneumonia, lobar, given as having 1,921 admissions, and 352 deaths, which seems pathetically low. However, reading the same chapter a few pages earlier, it says:

There was little or no infectious disease until influenza broke out with startling suddenness, first in June and July and again in October, in a world-wide epidemic which no medical service could control, and which laid low both friend and foe alike. The complete figures for the year are not available, but from 18th May to 10th August there were 226,615 admissions, including pyrexia of uncertain origin, and from 5th October to 28th December there were 87,323 admissions, including 6,627 cases of broncho-pneumonia, with 5,377 deaths.

So obviously my original reading of the figures is total rubbish somewhere along the line - I think I need to shut myself in a darkened room for a long time and try again when I emerge! But the sets of figures given certainly don't appear to tally.

Sue

Sue (and the rest of the contributors)
Thank you for your sterling effort in answering my initial question, I was interested particularly in the Western Front.
I would be most interested to read up on other theatres, as I am sure the others would.

Juggling cooking tea and the like is hard enough. Please carry on at your own pace. This is a fascinating thread.

DickW

My grandad served with the 7th A&SH in F&F June 1916 to Dec 1916. We was invalided back to Britain to recover from serve leg ulcers. Presumably these were contracted by standing in a mud filled trench in winter wearing a kilt . He returned to the front some months later, and survived the war but was still plagued by the pain in his legs.

Andy

IIRC didn't Haig come home from the WF with a recurrence of Malaria at some stage?

He had previously served in Sudan and South Africa. He suffered from recurrent attacks of the disease at later dates.
Glen

my grandfather was discharged in june 1918, after contacting nephritis in 1916 on the Somme.
he seemed to have spent a long time in hospital, and was never a fit man for the rest of his life.

.

Cases of Crabs (Pubic Lice) were very common,i have also come across cases of Weils disease contracted by Men who had been bathing in Canals,Lakes,Ponds etc,etc.

http://www.le.ac.uk/bl/gat/virtualfc/weil.html

What about fungal infections, I would say that sweat rash would probably be a problem, along with athletes foot, and potentailly ringworm.

I guess this is a testament to the human immune system but I am always surprised that, given the exceedingly filthy if not toxic conditions in which men had to live, sleep, eat, drink day to day the rate of casualties caused by bacterial infections was not considerably higher.

I am researching the men of Wheldrake in Yorkshire who saw action between 1914 and 1918. One of them who sae action in France was discharged due to recurring nephritis. There may be a whole raft of cases out there

I think that many cases of malaria must have been recurrences in men who had cought it elsewhere. The diary of an unknown nursing sister records a case in December 1914 on an ambulance train in Northern France. Don't get many mossies around there and then. An article by the WFA also provides another possible explanation.

"The diagnosis of the disease [typhoid] was often confused with tuberculosis and/or malaria. Also for many years' typhoid and malaria were erroneously thought by some military physicians to be part of the same disease pattern ? a sort of composite disease."

May I recommend

Very good, very readable book.

Parts of it you can find here:
http://books.google.nl/books?id=qR-mzZkvaM...;q=&f=false

Regards,
Yvonne

It was also a testament to the work of the Royal Engineers, pioneers and medical services.

Thanks, p.a.p.m.p.t,

Good point that

I've heard it said, and read, (but so long ago I can't remeber in which books) that WWI was the first major war that the UK (and constituant nations) engaged in where there were more casualties from enemy action than from disease. The RE get liitle acknowledgement for their contribution in keeping the relative number of casualties so low.

On the Western Front, the British Empire suffered a loss of 709,000 deaths from all causes. Of these, 95.5% were from enemy action, being killed in action or dying from wounds. The death rate from disease was astonishingly low, although it should be noted that several million men were sent to hospitals suffering from various ailments. About 87.5% of all France's military dead were from enemy action : likewise, for the Germans, battle deaths accounted for about 90% of all fatalities in their army.
The trenches in France and Flanders, for all their squalor, were havens of health compared with battlefields of former conflicts. Unfortunately for the soldiers, this was more than countered by the exponential growth in the lethality of the fighting !

Phil

It was also a testament to the work of the Royal Engineers, pioneers and medical services.

The trenches in France and Flanders, for all their squalor, were havens of health compared with battlefields of former conflicts. Unfortunately for the soldiers, this was more than countered by the exponential growth in the lethality of the fighting !

There is a lot of truth in this but it is anything but the whole truth. Yes, doctors (and nurses!) could do more for the sick and wounded than ever before, because of farely recent knowledge of hygiene and bacteria. WWI was indeed the first major war in which more men died from battlefield wounds than from disease. Nevertheless more men than ever before died of sickness (so much and much more men than ever before died of wounds). The more men dying from wounds, the easier it is to keep the sickness rate below that number. Doctors did their best but healing was 'making men fit for battle' and sick was a diagnosis meaning 'no right to a war pension'. Sick was: sick or wounded not as a result of battle, and wounded was 'wounded or sick as a result of battle'. It is obvious especially the psychiatric wounded became the victim of this. I fear the ugly truth is that in average the doctors looked more at military necessity than at medically and humanitarily necessity. Medicine did not so much help the sick and wounded, medicine above all helped the war.

Leo van Bergen
medical historian
author of: Before my Helpless Sight. Suffering, dying and military medicine on the Western front (Ashgate Publishing 2009)

Your statement suprises me, Sir. Considering the size of the armies and the duration of the conflict , the numbers of disease deaths ( on the Western Front) were remarkably low. The American armies in France were, relatively speaking, hardest hit. You are an authority, and you must know a lot more than I do about this. Please enlighten me.

Phil

The pattern of diseases is very interesting. On the issue of malaria, it was endemic in parts of France (see post here) but not in the areas in which the BEF was involved. Large numbers of men returned from Palestine and other malarious areas, especially in response to the German Spring offensives. As has been pointed out, this would have been the most likely cause for a rise in the incidence of malaria. As to the mistaken diagnosis of malaria, it is highly unlikely that the symptoms were confused with tyhpoid. Perhaps with typhus, which is not associated with diarrhoea. Even then, the history is normally a key differentiator in the absence of examination of the blood for evidence of the malaria parasite. Any soldier who had served in a malarious area, who had contracted malaria in the past, and who was experiencing a recurrence of the symptoms would very likely be diagnosed as having malaria on the WF. The name 'typhus' comes from the Greek tuphous, which refers to severe drowsiness and confusion associated with high fever. These are features of malaria too, indeed any infection causing high fever.

It must be recalled that the general pattern of illness in young fit men was different at that time. There are several diseases that were definitely linked to the war, but conditions like TB and nephritis (to name but two) were not uncommon before the war.

Tribute has rightly been paid to the Royal Engineers for their part in minimising sickness. Their work is a reminder that while the trenches may have been muddy at times, they were not filthy in the sense of disease-ridden as had been the case in some previous wars.

Robert

Robert, Your use of the word "malarious" intrigues me : I had always thought the right word would be "malarial". Is there any differential between the meaning of malarious and malarial ? For example, is it correct to refer to an illness as malarious, and to a swamp as malarial ?

Phil

Dear Phil,

Actually it is quite simple. Researchers on WWI often only look at the percentages of men returning 'healthy' from hospital . But the sheer number of men that got sick (certainly on the Eastern front, but in the west as well) was so enormous, that although not relatively speaking, certainly in actual numbers, it outweighed everything that had been seen in wars before. And as said the term healthy had (and has) another meaning in wartime than it has in peacetime. So even the percentage of men returning healthy would have been a lot lower if healthy was considered a bit more than just 'fit enough for battle'. As a commander said: 'If i can not séé there is something wrong, than there isn't something wrong'. Or as Magnus Hirschfeld said in his (fantastic) Sexual History of the World War: '90 percent of the men returned to battle. I wish I could say that was only due to the enormous skills of the physicians. But I can't.'

Leo van Bergen

On January 16 1916 the war diary of the 14th Royal Warwicks (Bham Pals) recorded its first case of measles in the Bray area of the Somme. On the 31st there were 23.

So for the whole of February (a leap year) the battalion was quarantined at Vaux sur Somme and segregated from their Brigade. They remained in this situation until March 6.

Hirschfeld...now that brings back memories. I remember, as a little boy, finding this book at the top of my mother's wardrobe : it wasn't about the war, it was more of a survey of sexual obsessions. All the salacious details were written in Latin, a language at which I developed a sudden proficiency. That year I was top of my class, and could translate Caesar's Gallic War perfectly, I had to wear boxing gloves at night, though....


Phil

Phil, at this point in time the only difference relates to the time in the morning when the post was written . I will check my medical texts.

Robert