The geographical transmission of smallpox in the Franco-Prussian War: prisoner of war camps and their impact upon epidemic diffusion processes in the civil settlement system of Prussia, 1870-71.

The disease history of nineteenth-century Europe was punctuated by a series of severe-sometimes catastrophic-epidemics which spread as a consequence of war.' In his great Handbook ofgeographical and historicalpathology (1883), August Hirsch traced one of the last "considerable" outbreaks of bubonic plague in Europe to "1828-29, when the Russian and Turkish forces came into collision in Wallachia".2 Likewise, writing of Asiatic cholera in the Baltic provinces and Poland in 1830-31, Hirsch observed how the "military operations of the Russo-Polish War contributed materially to its diffusion".3 Some thirty-five years later, the epidemic of cholera which spread as a consequence of the Austro-Prussian War (1866) claimed an estimated 165,000 lives in the Austrian Crownlands,4 while the Franco-Prussian War