Did Illness Defeat Napoleon?

By Daniel Lingenhöhl

Starting on June 24, 1812, round 600,000 troopers led by French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte crossed the Neman River to invade the Russian Empire. The struggle was one of the crucial pricey in historical past, and slightly below six months later, just a few tens of 1000’s of males returned throughout the river.

The large losses have traditionally been attributed to troopers falling in battle, succumbing to frostbite, ravenous to loss of life or dying in a typhus epidemic. However now a brand new, not-yet-peer-reviewed preprint research by microbiologist Rémi Barbieri of Paris Metropolis College and his crew have recognized different pathogens that may even have been accountable for a lot of the loss of life.

Historic information from the time present that medical doctors that accompanied the military identified typhus from signs similar to fever, complications and pores and skin rashes, and an evaluation of stays in a 2006 research had instructed attainable infections with typhus and trench fever. However when Barbieri and his crew examined the preserved enamel of 13 of Napoleon’s fallen troopers, they have been unable to seek out any proof of Rickettsia prowazekii, the bacterium accountable for epidemic typhus, or Bartonella quintana, the reason for trench fever, which contaminated greater than 1,000,000 troopers throughout World Conflict I.

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As a substitute they discovered traces of the bacterium Salmonella enterica—which causes typhoid fever, to not be confused with typhus—and Borrelia recurrentis, which causes relapsing fever and is principally transmitted by physique lice.

With the assistance of recent drugs, typhoid and relapsing fever each have very excessive survival charges. However these beforehand unidentified pathogens may have simply triggered loss of life in troopers who had already been weakened from chilly and starvation and have been residing in horrible hygienic circumstances.

The researchers notice that their pattern of 13 troopers is simply too small to ensure that different illnesses, similar to typhus, didn’t kill many different troopers throughout Napoleon’s retreat. They solely haven’t but discovered proof of such infections.

Napoleon himself survived the retreat virtually unscathed. The losses introduced his rule over Europe to a sluggish finish, nevertheless. In 1815 Napoleon was lastly defeated by the U.Okay. and Prussia on the Battle of Waterloo.

This text initially appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission.

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