| 1871. | 1872. | |
|---|---|---|
| Demmin | 1·1 | 2·6 |
| Anklam | 4·3 | 15·8 |
| Usedom-Wollin | 16·4 | 16·2 |
| Uckermünde | 24·7 | 26·4 |
| Randow | 70·4 | 29·3 |
| Greifenhagen | 37·8 | 26·3 |
| Pyritz | 15·3 | 23·1 |
| Saazig | 27·8 | 27·4 |
| Naugard | 32·4 | 32·6 |
| Kammin | 10·3 | 13·3 |
| Greifenberg | 4·3 | 10·4 |
| Regenwalde | 16·4 | 27·5 |
At the stronghold of Kolberg (Governmental District of Köslin) 3,500 prisoners arrived on November 4, and in December and January they were followed by the arrival of more transports. The first cases among these prisoners were reported on November 14; all told, 175 of them contracted small-pox and 24 succumbed to it. On January 7 the disease spread to the civil population, but did not rage very extensively in the city; 127 civilians contracted it and 24 succumbed to it, and in August 1871 it disappeared; only two men in the garrison were taken sick. Many of the prisoners in Kolberg were transported to Stettin, Köslin, and Stolp, and in all three of these places the disease broke out among the civil inhabitants. In Schivelbein an infected soldier was found among the prisoners who arrived on January 24, 1871, and on January 26 he was committed to the lazaret; in February a working-man contracted the disease in the same lazaret, and after that the epidemic spread throughout the city and did not disappear until October 1872; it carried away a relatively large number of people and spread to two neighbouring villages. But taking the Governmental District of Köslin as a whole, it may be said that the dissemination of small-pox was moderate; the district of Schlawe had the largest number of deaths (22·7 per 10,000 inhabitants). On the other hand, in the year 1872 small-pox caused a very large number of deaths in the districts of Neustettin, Dramburg, Schlawe, Rummelsburg, and Stolp.
The number of cases of the disease in the Governmental District of Stralsund was very large. Small-pox broke out very severely among the French prisoners in the city of Stralsund, the maximum number of whom was 2,991; of these 234 contracted the disease and 35 succumbed to it. The prisoners arrived on December 4, and among them was a small-pox patient; he was committed to the lazaret on December 9. In the garrison, which averaged 3,700 men, there were only thirty-one cases of the disease and one death. The first case among the civil inhabitants occurred on January 7; the patient was a clerk who lived near the lazaret and had had more or less intercourse with the prisoners. Of twenty-three more cases that occurred before January 15, at least six were shown to be directly attributable to the epidemic among the prisoners; one of the six was a sick-attendant, two were working-men in the military lazaret, and the other three were members of the families of attendants. The epidemic then became very widespread; to the end of the year 1871 the number of deaths was 366, and the number of reported cases was 1,807. In Greifswald a French prisoner contracted small-pox on October 18, 1870, in the military reserve lazaret, another on November 1, and a third on November 16. The first civilian, an attendant, contracted the disease on December 13, and on January 6, 1871, a working-man, who had transported the attendant from the military lazaret to the town small-pox hospital, was taken sick. Until February 14, ten more cases were reported, and then the epidemic began. Up to the end of the year 1871 no less than 578 cases of the disease and 111 deaths caused by it were reported to the authorities. In the year 1872 there were only a few deaths caused by small-pox throughout the entire Governmental District of Stralsund.
In the case of the two adjacent confederate states of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz no small-pox mortality statistics are available. On September 20, prisoners from Metz were taken to the reserve lazaret in Schwerin, and among them was a small-pox patient who died eight days later. In the same month an assistant in the lazaret was taken sick, and in October and December two more members of the lazaret staff contracted the disease. The pestilence spread to the civil population because the attendants who were commissioned to dispose of the effects of the dead, instead of destroying them, sold or gave them to the inhabitants. The epidemic, which spread rapidly throughout the surrounding country, was quite severe and lasted until March 1871. In Wismar two cases of small-pox were reported among the prisoners in December, and these were followed by six more cases in January and February; in the garrison, which averaged 1,219 men, there were 48 cases of the disease (5 in January, 32 in February, 9 in March, and 2 in April); 3 of the 48 were fatal. At Rostock 649 prisoners arrived on November 11, and these were followed by 544 more on December 14; among the latter there were two small-pox patients, and in the course of the next few months forty-one more cases of the disease and six deaths were reported.
Berlin suffered severely from an epidemic of small-pox in the years 1871–2. The last large epidemic there had occurred in the year 1801, and had carried away 1,626 out of 176,700 inhabitants. In the year 1864 another rather mild epidemic had broken out, but had quickly disappeared. In the year 1870 the number of small-pox patients in Berlin was small; an average of nine persons per month succumbed to the disease between the first part of August and the last part of November. In the month of December 1870 the death-rate began to increase, at first rather slowly; the number of deaths in that month was 22, and in March 1872 it was 176. The epidemic now began to spread rapidly, and in June it reached its climax with 648 deaths; during the summer it abated a little, but in the fall it began to rage more and more furiously until December, when it reached a second climax with 671 deaths. The progress of the epidemic is shown by the following table, taken from Guttstadt’s excellent book. The number of deaths caused by small-pox in Berlin was:
| November (1870) | 9 |
| December | 22 |
| January (1871) | 48 |
| February | 80 |
| March | 176 |
| April | 349 |
| May | 430 |
| June | 648 |
| July | 532 |
| August | 528 |
| September | 490 |
| October | 600 |
| November | 660 |
| December | 671 |
| January (1872) | 445 |
| February | 256 |
| March | 151 |
| April | 117 |
| May | 76 |
| June | 33 |
| July | 18 |
| August | 10 |
The disease was unusually severe and virulent; fifteen per cent of the patients died in the hospitals. The total number of deaths[[270]] in the year 1871, when the population of the city was 826,341, was 5,212, or 63·1 per 10,000 inhabitants; thus the total mortality, which in the years 1867–70 had been 31·8 per cent (including the still-births), reached the prodigious height of 40·4 per cent. The cause of the wide dissemination of small-pox in Berlin was the fact that large numbers of people, including children, had never been vaccinated, and only a few had ever been revaccinated. According to a rough estimate made by Guttstadt, of Berlin’s total population in the year 1871 some 20,000 people had never been vaccinated, 530,000 had been vaccinated only once, and only 270,000 had been revaccinated; fourteen per cent of those who had never been vaccinated, two per cent of those who had been vaccinated once, and O·5 per cent of those who had been revaccinated, contracted the disease. In the garrison, which averaged 9,110 men, only 57 cases of the disease and 4 deaths were reported between July 1, 1870, and June 30, 1871. But few prisoners were taken to Berlin; only 24 prisoners suffering from small-pox were committed to the lazarets, and of these only 4 died; the first two cases were in August and September.
In the Governmental District of Potsdam only those districts which bordered directly on Berlin were severely attacked by small-pox in the year 1871, e.g. the districts of Niederbarnim, Teltow, Jüterbog, Luckenwalde, and East and West Havelland; in the following years those districts bordering on Niederbarnim (as Oberbarnim, Angermünde, and Templin) also suffered severely. In the city of Potsdam two Frenchmen contracted the disease on February 6, shortly after their arrival there, and on February 19 a soldier who had accompanied them was taken sick. In April an epidemic of rather wide extent was raging in the city; the number of deaths caused by small-pox in April 1871 was 157 (34·5 per 10,000 inhabitants), and in April 1872 it was 71 (16·2 per 10,000). In the city of Brandenburg-on-the-Havel an infected French soldier arrived in February 1871; he communicated the disease to his attendant, and in that very month cases of small-pox were reported among the civil inhabitants of the city, although it was impossible to prove a connexion between them and that of the French soldier. The number of deaths, all told, was 59. The number of deaths per 10,000 inhabitants in the Governmental District of Potsdam was:
| 1871. | 1872. | |
|---|---|---|
| Prenzlau | 7·5 | 11·1 |
| Templin | 17·5 | 28·4 |
| Angermünde | 15·0 | 53·4 |
| Oberbarnim | 18·2 | 33·8 |
| Niederbarnim | 36·5 | 27·1 |
| Teltow | 46·4 | 40·4 |
| Beeskow-Storkow | 20·6 | 39·8 |
| Jüterbog-Luckenwalde | 43·4 | 38·7 |
| Zauch-Belzig | 14·6 | 38·1 |
| East Havelland | 37·7 | 14·7 |
| West Havelland | 32·3 | 33·4 |
| Ruppin | 26·8 | 13·3 |
| East Priegnitz | 14·9 | 12·6 |
| West Priegnitz | 16·8 | 23·3 |
In the Governmental District of Frankfurt small-pox raged only to a moderate extent in the year 1871. In Frankfurt-on-the-Oder itself there were sporadic outbreaks of the disease every year. On November 12 two infected prisoners from Metz were committed to the hospital, and before the end of that month two attendants contracted the disease; a few cases also occurred in the garrison in the month of November. Of the French prisoners, whose maximum number was 756, eight contracted the disease and two succumbed to it; in the garrison, which averaged 1,881 men, there were 21 cases of the disease and no deaths. Among the civil inhabitants, on the other hand, a somewhat more severe epidemic raged; whereas in the year 1870 only 21 cases of the disease were reported, in the year 1871 there were 19 cases in the month of January alone; until May some 196 persons contracted the disease, which after that began to abate. The number of deaths, all told, in the year 1871 was 117, and in 1872 it was 70. In Landsberg-on-the-Warthe small-pox broke out in the middle of November in consequence of the arrival of an infected prisoner; the first case among the civil inhabitants was reported on November 20. The total number of deaths in the year 1871 was 97. At Kottbus an infected French prisoner arrived on October 1, resulting in a rather severe epidemic among the civil inhabitants (114 deaths in the year 1871). Not until the year 1872 did the disease become very widespread in the Governmental District of Frankfurt; with the exception of the city of Frankfurt there was no district which suffered more severely in the year 1871 than in 1872. In most of the districts small-pox broke out very virulently, the only exceptions being the districts of Lübben and Spremberg.