This ultimately intensified racial tensions and fueled efforts to ban immigrants to the US from the Southern Hemisphere because the immigrants were associated with the disease. Literature
(1847) In Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, an outbreak of typhus occurs in Janes school Lowood, highlighting the unsanitary conditions the girls live in. (1862) In Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, Evgeny Bazarov dissects a local peasant and dies after contracting typhus. (1886) In the short story "Excellent People" by Anton Chekhov, typhus kills a Russian provincial. (1886) In The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous by George Augustus Henry Sala: "We Convicts were all had to the Grate, for the Knight and Alderman would not venture further in, for fear of the Gaol Fever;"
(1890) In How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, the effects of typhus fever and smallpox on "Jewtown" are described. (1935) Hans Zinssers Rats, Lice and History, although a touch outdated on the science, contains many useful cross-references to classical and historical impact of typhus. (1940) in The Don Flows Home to the Sea by Mikhail Sholokhov, numerous characters contract typhus during the Russian Civil War. (1946) In Viktor Frankls Mans Search for Meaning, Frankl, a Nazi concentration camp prisoner and trained psychiatrist, treats fellow prisoners for delirium due to typhus, while being occascionally affected with the disease himself. (1955) In Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita, Humbert Humberts childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh, dies of typhus.
During a time when there were 241 capital offences, more prisoners died from gaol fever than were put to death by all the public executioners in the realm. In 1759 an English authority estimated that each year a quarter of the prisoners had died from gaol fever. In London, typhus frequently broke out among the ill-kept prisoners of Newgate Gaol and moved into the general city population. 19th century
Epidemics occurred in the British Isles and throughout Europe, for instance, during the English Civil War, the Thirty Years War, and the Napoleonic Wars. Many historians believe that the typhus outbreak among Napoleons troops is the real reason why he stalled his military campaign into Russia, rather than starvation or the cold. A major epidemic occurred in Ireland between 1816 and 1819, and again in the late 1830s. Another major typhus epidemic occurred during the Great Irish Famine between 1846 and 1849. The Irish typhus spread to England, where it was sometimes called "Irish fever" and was noted for its virulence. It killed people of all social classes since lice were endemic and inescapable, but it hit particularly hard in the lower or "unwashed" social strata. It was carried to North America by the many Irish refugees who fled the famine. In Canada, the 1847 North American typhus epidemic killed more than 20,000 people, mainly Irish immigrants in fever sheds and other forms of quarantine, who had contracted the disease aboard coffin ships.