As many as 900,000 deaths have been attributed to the typhus fever during the Crimean War in 1853–1856, and 270,000 to the 1868 Finnish typhus epidemic.In the United States, a typhus epidemic struck Philadelphia in 1837. The son of Franklin Pierce died in 1843 of a typhus epidemic in Concord, New Hampshire. Several epidemics occurred in Baltimore, Memphis, and Washington, D.C. between 1865 and 1873. Typhus fever was also a significant killer during the American Civil War, although typhoid fever was the more prevalent cause of US Civil War "camp fever." Typhoid is a completely different disease from typhus. Typically more men died on both sides of disease than wounds.Rudolph Carl Virchow, a physician, anthropologist, and historian attempted to control an outbreak of typhus in Upper Silesia and wrote a 190-page report about it. He concluded that the solution to the outbreak did not lie in individual treatment or by providing small changes in housing, food or clothing, but rather in widespread structural changes to directly address the issue of poverty. Virchows experience in Upper Silesia led to his observation that "Medicine is a social science". His report led to changes in German public health policy. 20th century
Typhus was endemic in Poland and several neighboring countries prior to World War I (1914–1918). During and shortly after the war, epidemic typhus caused up to three million deaths in Russia, and several million citizens also died in Poland and Romania.
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.