The biggest epidemics in the history of Poland

Infectious diseases have accompanied mankind for millennia. The epidemics did not bypass Poland, affecting not only history, but also the functioning of institutions and the lives of ordinary people. Here are the biggest epidemics in the history of our country.

The plague epidemic in Poland

Throughout human history, epidemics and pandemics have fundamentally affected the fate of societies. Some of them contributed to a deep crisis of empires, others provided an opportunity to make up the civilization gap between less developed and better societies. Diseases also inspired works of culture. Most importantly, the epidemics were a tragedy for ordinary people, affected by consequences unimaginable for generations living in an era of highly developed medicine and hygiene. Fighting epidemics and overcoming some of them can be considered one of the most important, often underrated, successes in history.

Our knowledge of the earliest infectious disease epidemics in Poland is relatively small. Undoubtedly, the XNUMXth-century plague, raging in Western Europe, treated Poland and some other regions of Central Europe more gently. However, the plague kept coming back over the next three centuries. At the end of the XNUMXth century, epidemics of this disease occurred in Krakow every two or three years, and even one year after the year.

In the years 1500–1750, 92 epidemics were recorded there – the largest number of all Polish cities. In the years 1601–1650, there were 19 of them in Kraków, and 33 in Warsaw. Later, the incidence in both cities remained at a similar level.

We know about the 1588th-century plagues in the lands of the Crown and Lithuania, among others thanks to the chronicles that described the journeys of the rulers in search of places free from “pestilential air”. «His Majesty King Zygmunt left Krakow for the air […] because it was already dying [it was dying – ed. ed.] in Krakow. […] The dear to His Majesty the King was to Sędziomirz [Sandomierz – ed. ed.] and there marto [dying – ed. ed.], then to Lublin from Lublin to Warsaw. Soon the royal court had an air of air, it was dead wherever one turned ”- described the Krakow chronicler under the date XNUMX.

Great or local plagues paralyzed the activities of the already weak state institutions. The sources often mention the suspension of the work of courts and tribunals. A completely unique event was the delay of key events for the state, including funerals. The plague in Krakow in 1599 delayed the funeral of Queen Anna Habsburżanka for a year.

Not understanding the plague’s transmission mechanisms, attempts were made to predict its arrival. In 1591, a physician and philosopher, educated in Bologna, Piotr Umiastowski published a catalog of signs that herald an epidemic in his work entitled “Science about the plague air into four unfolded books”. He mentioned, among others the appearance of a comet, a huge number of frogs and sudden changes in the weather. The signal was also to be the rapid rotting of meat exposed to the wind or the dying of dogs watered with morning dew. These were logical conclusions resulting from the belief that the epidemic was caused by the “pestilential air”.

Epidemics During Wars

In modern times, epidemics went hand in hand with wars. Both these “horsemen of the apocalypse” were favored by chaos and the displacement of masses of people. During many modern wars, the number of deaths in battle was incomparably lower than that of those who died as a result of epidemics such as dysentery, dysentery or typhus. The plague devastating the army of Sweden and the Commonwealth was in 1629 one of the main reasons for the ceasefire.

Epidemics during the wars of the mid-seventeenth century took a terrible toll. During the so-called Żaniec campaign during the Chmielnicki Uprising in 1653, numbering 30 thousand. soldiers, the Crown Army lost about 20 thousand. «In Warsaw I scream from the stench of beaten and unburied corpses and horses; also in Poznań and the Swedes are dying, and there was a conception among our army »- it was written about the plague of 1655–1656.

The epidemics could also paralyze the Viennese relief. “Almost half of our army suffers from a disease similar to a plague”, wrote King Jan III Sobieski in a letter to Queen Marysieńka.

The plagues hit the devastated Poland also in the 1772th century. In the late XNUMXs, the plague became a pretext for Austria and POur Country to establish a sanitary cordon on the border with the Republic of Poland. The annexations of the borderland carried out at that time became the prelude to the first partition in XNUMX.

The dramatic epidemics in the 7th and 1711th centuries in Poland and other European countries also caused an increase in social unrest. Accusations of knowingly causing disease were becoming more frequent. Their victims were, among others gravediggers, barbers and healers who were suspected of wanting to earn some extra money from fake medicines or organizing funerals. The Jewish community, whose representatives were allegedly less likely to suffer from epidemic diseases, were also accused. On March XNUMX, XNUMX, three gravediggers were executed in Lublin, accused of spreading the plague. During the torture, they pleaded guilty for profit: “We smashed a corpse’s head and chose the brain and lubricated the doors of tenement houses and houses”. Epidemics of the XNUMXth century also influenced the then Baroque fascination with death and passing away.

The plague epidemics in Europe ceased by the beginning of the 300th century. By then, the Black Death had taken a terrible toll. Relatively reliable estimates of the number of those who died in POur Country say about 1709. victims in the years 1713–1771. In 50, a plague in Moscow killed 100-1. inhabitants, or even 3/XNUMX of the city’s population. The plague was to return to Europe in the decades to come, but on an incomparably smaller scale. Cholera epidemics were to become the nightmare of the nineteenth century.

Cholera epidemics in Poland

At the beginning of the XNUMXs, accounts of merchants traveling to India and Southeast Asia include descriptions of the disease as manifested by vomiting, diarrhea, weight loss and spots on the body. Arab sailors called her “kholera”, which means “the passage of bile”.

Its expansion began in the most distant regions of Asia, including Japan, closed to the world. In 1830 it reached Our Country and then other European countries. The exotic disease was initially treated as a harmless curiosity from the farthest corner of the world. The German poet Heinrich Heine wrote about the first days of the infection: “Because it was the midday [fourth Sunday of Lent – ed. ed.], the sun was shining, and the weather was lovely, Parisians walked in crowds with all the more simple-mindedness along the boulevards, where you could see masks, which, parodying their morbid tint and depressed face, mocked the fear of illness and the disease itself ».

Rich Parisians and townspeople from other metropolises in Europe at that time thought that cholera was taking its toll only among the lowest social circles. However, already in 1831, Prince Konstanty Romanov died of this disease, who, after escaping from Warsaw in November 1830, watched the actions of the army against the insurgents. At almost the same time, on June 10, 1831, Field Marshal Ivan Dybicz Zabałkański, commanding the tsarist army, died. Also in 1831, cholera took the great representatives of POur Country’s intellectual life – Carl von Clausewitz and Georg Wilhelm Hegel. Probably the victim of one of the successive waves of the plague was Adam Mickiewicz, who died in 1855 in Istanbul.

Cholera pandemics were a breakthrough in thinking about counteracting infectious diseases. In 1854, British physician John Snow began researching the spread of cholera in the poorest boroughs of London. In his opinion, the theory of miasms, which had been in force since the Middle Ages, that of causing disease by “bad air”, was wrong. Snow managed to identify the source of the plague – the well located at the epicenter of the disease.

Over the next several decades, the discovery of the causes of cholera led to the beginning of the fight against the epidemic, including by building modern water and sewage systems. Urban planners and architects also sought to densify the buildings, incl. thanks to the construction of parks. In cities, regulations were also introduced that prohibited pouring waste into gutters or directly onto the street. In the largest centers, and then in smaller cities of the Polish lands, control of the quality of water and food sold has also begun. More and more actions were taken by state institutions, e.g. by issuing sanitary regulations in the event of an epidemic, “[…] that every suspicion of cholera would be reported to the poviat political authority” – it was stated in the regulations in force in Lviv in 1910.

Charitable initiatives were also of great importance in the fight against epidemics. At the beginning of World War I, the Bishop of Kraków, Prince Adam Sapieha, created a sanitary section composed mainly of medical students. Their task was to reach the smallest villages of Galicia in order to vaccinate local peasants. These actions could save up to three million inhabitants of this region. Vaccination against typhus, in turn, reduced the risk of an epidemic of this disease during World War II. Vaccines produced in the famous Lviv laboratory of Rudolf Weigl were smuggled into the ghettos where typhus took the greatest toll.

In the nineteenth century, however, plagues still posed a huge threat to the social order. In 1846, a cholera epidemic hit Małopolska and Podhale. It was preceded by catastrophic crop failures and floods. Hunger riots broke out in many places, which eventually turned into the Galician slaughter. The chaos was exacerbated by the migrations of people who transferred germs to other areas.

Spanish flu epidemic in Poland

The great displacement of the masses of the population also contributed to the rapid expansion of the most terrible pandemic of the last two hundred years – the Spanish flu. According to various estimates, it killed from 50 to 100 million people worldwide, and nearly 500 million fell ill.

Contrary to its name, the virus was transferred to Europe from the USA by American soldiers going to the front. The Spaniard differed from most pandemics in world history. She took not the weakest and those burdened with serious diseases, but above all young and middle-aged people. Mortality was increased by the fact that the Spanish fell to European societies weakened by the disastrous living conditions during the First World War.

Today it is impossible to determine the number of victims of a Spanish woman in Poland. The chaos of the first months of independence, great migrations, and then the rolling front of the war with the Bolsheviks obliterated most of the traces of the plague.

In 1939–1944, most documents of the largest Warsaw cemeteries were destroyed, which would be an excellent source for estimating the mortality of the capital’s inhabitants. We know the Spanish epidemic almost exclusively from memories and the press of that time.

«He prowls the villages in a terrifying way […] there is almost no cottage in which there would be no Spanish woman sick […] The death rate is enormous. Carpenters in villages and towns do nothing else but coffins. […] The population fell into a feeling of utter apathy, because there was no way to prevent the plague “, wrote the Galician Voice of the Nation in the autumn of 1918.

In the weekly “Piast” we read an even more dramatic account: “

Funerals are usually held without crying, because often the whole family of the deceased lies in a fever and there is no one to cry over the coffin. It often happens that a mother, lying unconscious in a fever, does not know that her dead child is being taken out of the house.

Entire families were also ill in cities, and this applied to every social group. Obituaries of a husband and wife or of two or three children were published in newspapers. Often death came very quickly. “In the morning you are healthy, in the evening you are gone” – it was said then.

Many have tried to use the epidemic to advertise clandestine medical preparations and even their restaurants. In the pages of the Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny, one of the restaurants in Krakow announced that “hygienic and tasty” dishes protect against disease. Fear was also extinguished with humor: “A future line on Matyska: a Spanish woman is hugging her neck / I will not give up – he shouted with pride / Until he was gone” – we read in a poem in “Kurier Poznański”.

The memory of the Spanish language is present in the folklore of Warsaw: “We, the people of Warsaw, are the way we are / Whoever imprints us – he is a Spaniard – cold tru” – bands inspired by the music of the capital’s courtyards sing to this day.

The poems written during previous influenza epidemics were also recalled. «About influenzo, Nympho, where are you from? Are you an epidemic disease? What happened? What is the reason for you? / That you are wasting husbands, children and women in the city and in the surrounding area? » – wrote an anonymous author, paraphrasing a fragment of Juliusz Słowacki’s “Beniowski”. The content of the poem makes you realize that it was not until the end of the XNUMXth century that the mechanisms of transmission of the common flu were discovered. Previously, they were one of the many mysteries of medicine.

The epidemic from 100 years ago is still used politically today. During the Polish-Bolshevik war, losses due to the plague among Bolshevik prisoners of war in Poland amounted to approx. 25 thousand. a total of 85 In Our Country and Lithuania, there were nearly 51 prisoners of war camps at that time. Polish soldiers, up to 20 died as a result of this disease among them. The huge losses among Soviet soldiers are a pretext for contemporary Our Country to put forward theses about the alleged starvation of these prisoners by Poles. This thesis is part of the narrative of “anti-Katyn” – alleged murders committed on the orders of the Polish authorities 20 years before the crime of Polish prisoners of war.

The only recipe for fighting the epidemic was to introduce strict rules of isolation. However, it was difficult to enforce these laws in very densely populated cities. The pandemic ended in the late 1920s and never returned to a similar intensity. In the following decades, however, dangerous flu epidemics reached Poland again. The two most dangerous (H2N2 and H3N2), in 1957 and 1969, came from Asia. The latter claimed approximately 1300 victims in Poland.

Smallpox epidemic in Poland

Smallpox caused anxiety in ancient societies. It was the cause of approx. 15 percent. deaths in European populations. The mortality rate reached 30 percent, among American Indians it could reach 90 percent.

At the beginning of the XNUMXth century, the so-called variations. The procedure consisted of implanting a fluid from smallpox pustules under the skin. Subjected to such vaccination, he underwent a mild form of smallpox and obtained permanent immunity. The procedure was so popular that even the rulers of that time, including Tsarina Catherine II, used it. At the end of the XNUMXs, the doctor of King Stanisław August Poniatowski also began to perform it. The procedure, however, was quite risky.

The mortality rate of “mild” smallpox was about 3%, which today may seem a shockingly high percentage, but almost irrelevant to people living in societies of high epidemic risk.

The improvement of vaccination by Edward Jenner at the end of the 1978th century began the process of the global fight against smallpox, culminating in its defeat in XNUMX. This moment was predicted by Jenner himself: “The end result of vaccination will be the complete eradication of smallpox – a terrible scourge of the human race.” Smallpox eradication was one of the greatest successes in medical history.

1. Read more: It has been 40 years since smallpox has been completely eradicated

The success of vaccination, despite the great resistance of a large part of the population, inspired many scientists to study the spread of other diseases. Among Polish scientists, the most famous is Prof. Hilary Koprowski, who, working in the USA, invented the polio vaccine in 1950 and contributed to the rapid elimination of the disease in Poland, leading to the sending of nine million doses of the new vaccine to Polish doctors – just a year after its introduction to the market. To date, polio has been almost completely eradicated in all corners of the globe.

When the world entered the decade of the XNUMXs with optimism, which was to bring further great successes in the fight against infectious diseases, the almost defeated smallpox remembered in Poland.

In July 1963, Bonifacy Jedynak, an officer of the Security Service, brought it from Asia (some sources say about India, others about Burma and Vietnam). 99 people (mostly medical staff) fell ill, seven of whom died. The city was paralyzed for several weeks and cut off from the rest of the country by a sanitary cordon. 98 percent were vaccinated. the population of Wrocław. People suspected of having contact with the sick were placed in isolatories. Nevertheless, smallpox made its way to five other provinces without causing an epidemic there. WHO predicted that this plague will last two years, will fall ill 2 thousand. people and 200 will die. Meanwhile, it expired 25 days after its detection. The events of 1963 were described in a report by Jerzy Ambroziewicz, who focused his narrative on the sacrifice of medical personnel in their struggle with infection. This theme seems to be common to all works devoted to epidemics – from medieval morality plays, through classic novels, to contemporary catastrophic films and series.

More to read – on the Dzieje.pl historical website

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