European Medicine and Foreign Diseases in a Global War

Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the role of disease and the nature of medicine in the Seven Years’ War, demonstrating the considerable impact of disease on both European and overseas campaigns. Diseases such as typhus and yellow fever disrupted campaigning and spread into surrounding civilian populations, exacerbating manpower pressures. As a result, military and naval practices of the Seven Years’ War shaped European medicine and its manpower accounting methods. Moreover, the war’s global scope introduced European soldiers and sailors to different disease environments, developing a European framework of foreign and tropical regions that were contrasted with moderate and domestic European climates. The experience of dealing with disease outbreaks in far-flung campaigns thus contributed to emerging notions of the tropics and thereby European identity, as well as developing theories of racial characteristics.