History and Philosophy

My main project for the past four years has been to produce an annotated translation of the manuscript Poema de Hibernia which is a long epic poem in Latin of more than 5,500 lines penned about 1693. This is one of only three primary sources describing the Jacobite regime in Ireland 1685-91 from the Irish point of view and comes from a top official of that regime who is accordingly well-informed. The poem will be published in summer 2017 by the Irish Manuscripts Commission.

I am at present embarked on a transnational comparative study of epidemic disease in wartime armies between 1674 and 1763. This study will categorize, quantify and, finally, evaluate. What were the killer epidemic diseases of European armies in wartime between the 1670s and the 1760s? How many soldiers did these diseases afflict and how many did they kill? How did authorities conceptualize and respond to the massive public health challenge involved? The fourth and final goal is to carry out the first three goals with regard to military and medical developments: for instance, strategy increasingly favoured big field armies embarking on long marches broken by protracted encampments and physicians moved slowly from a Hippocratic paradigm to a mechanical one and increasingly fretted about ‘miasma’ and about propreté in camps.

I propose to achieve the key goals by use of case studies chosen from across Europe to include Roussillon, Ireland, the Milanese, Crimea, Serbia, Bohemia, the Rhineland, Dutch Brabant and Portugal. These episodes have not been chosen for their enduring military significance but because they present a relatively well-documented target group for epidemiological studies. While admitting the difficulties, it is possible to disentangle three categories of disease based on the close observations by physicians like Pringle and Dezon and on the characteristic patterns of seasonal incidence: these are the dysentery of high summer, 'bilious fever' (typhoid and malaria) of late summer/autumn and (typically) wintertime typhus.The studies are grounded in runs of data whichcan tell us how many soldiers died of sickness as distinct from overall attrition through combat and desertion.