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[First P [114], ( Lines: 0 ——— 0.0pt ——— Short P PgEnds [114], (« 7 » Physical and Mental Health Early modern European armies were notoriously unhealthy. During the chronic warfare of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, far more soldiers died of sickness than in battle. Taken together, disease and exposure could cripple an army faster and more completely than a pitched battle.1 Little had changed by the eighteenth century. Dr. John Pringle, senior medical officer for the British army during the War of the Austrian Succession , found that about one in ten soldiers in Flanders were usually sick, suffering colds, respiratory illnesses, typhus, and fevers; at the height of the campaigning season and during the wet winters in the Low Countries, up to a quarter of the army might be sick or hospitalized.2 Explanations for the illness that characterized armies are not hard to find. Crowded conditions in camp and fortress were ideal breeding grounds for a variety of illnesses; typhus was known as “jail fever” and also as “camp fever.” Respiratory diseases flourished in army camps; filth from unwashed bodies, discarded foods, and human and animal wastes supported bacteria and parasites that easily found their way into digestive systems.3 Equally important was the composition of the armies themselves. The coming together of country folk and city-dwellers meant a collision of disease environments, while the presence of children provided a non-immune host for smallpox and other “childhood” diseases. These folks were often poorly housed against the elements; purpose-built barracks were few in Britain and always crowded and poorly maintained. At the same time, soldiers were not issued seasonal clothing: the heavy woolens and linens of the basic uniform served summer and winter, fair weather and foul.4 As European armies and their colonial allies gathered in America, oldworld experiences were repeated in the new. In one notorious example, an Anglo-American expedition raised in 1740 to seize the Spanish American port of Cartagena was virtually destroyed by disease without ever coming to grips with the enemy. By 1742 over three-quarters of the troops, many of them raised in the colonies, had died. Two decades later a much larger physical and mental health 115 [115], (2) Lines: 44 t ——— 0.0pt P ——— Short Page PgEnds: T [115], (2) army, poised to attack Havana, suffered a sick rate of 10 percent before ever departing for the heat, swamps, and yellow fever of Cuba.5 While service in the mainland colonies never posed the same threat to British soldiers, illness stalked the army from New York and Pennsylvania to Nova Scotia and Canada during the Seven Years’ War.6 One estimate suggests that the army lost between 15 and 30 percent of its strength annually from all causes, including deaths, desertion, and men discharged as unfit for service.7 As it neared its objective of Fort Duquesne in early November 1758, Gen. John Forbes’s army suffered an 11 percent rate of sickness; among his provincials the number shot up to nearly one man in four.8 The experience of Forbes’s army suggests that if redcoats continued to suffer from camp diseases, seasonal malnutrition, and exposure, their provincial allies fared even worse. Camps at places like Albany, Halifax, or Carlisle, Pennsylvania, were unprecedented phenomena in the colonies: thousands of men, women, and children thrown together for weeks or months in numbers that easily rivaled those of the largest cities in British America. American soldiers, most from rural backgrounds, found the experience at once strange, exhilarating, and dangerous. Farms boys knew little about the basics of camp sanitation and had to be warned repeatedly that they would be “severely punish’d” if they relieved themselves anywhere but in “the House of Office.”9 Poor hygiene leading to typhus or typhoid fever only added to the woes of young men never exposed to the crowd diseases common in Europe or in colonial port towns. Smallpox was a particular danger and certainly killed more provincial soldiers than did French bullets. British soldiers were far more likely to have been exposed to the disease as children than their colonial camp mates, and smallpox remained a characteristic of provincial military forces throughout the war. The mere rumor of smallpox was enough to panic colonial troops; when the disease appeared among Virginia troops in Forbes’s army in 1758, regular officers tried to keep the outbreak “as much a secret as possible.”10 Men lost through sickness, deaths from...

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