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.
During World War II, there were three kinds of potentially useful killed vaccines. All three killed vaccines relied on the cultivation of Rickettsia prowazekii, the organism responsible for typhus. The first attempt at a killed vaccine was developed by Germany, using the Rickettsia prowazekii found in louse feces. The vaccine was tested extensively in Poland between the two world wars and used by the Germans for their troops during their attacks on the Soviet Union.A second method of growing Rickettsia prowazekii was discovered using the yolk sac of chick embryos. Germans tried several times to use this technique of growing Rickettsia prowazekii but no effort was pushed very far.The last technique was an extended development of the previously known method of growing murine typhus in rodents. It was discovered that rabbits could be infected, by a similar process, and contract classical typhus instead of murine typhus. Again, while proven to produce suitable Rickettsia prowazekii for vaccine development, this method was not used to produce wartime vaccines.During WWII, the two major vaccines available were the killed vaccine grown in lice and the live vaccine from France. Neither was used much during the war. The killed, louse-grown vaccine was difficult to manufacture in large enough quantities, and the French vaccine was not believed to be safe enough for use.The Germans worked to develop their own live vaccine from the urine of typhus victims. While developing a live vaccine, Germany used live Rickettsia prowazekii to test multiple possible vaccines capabilities.