The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army Book

I did not enjoy this. Napoleon's invasion of Russia is very interesting and typhus is very interesting, but this book is under-reasoned and over-written.

To start with "over-written": holy crap. Anthropomorphize typhus once, yeah sure fine whatever. But Talty writes endlessly and repeatedly about the bacteria "planning" and how clever it was to choose lice as a vector, so much so that I became convinced that he forgot that the bacteria didn't choose anything, they don't collude; they're bacteria. And on that note, Talty: Rickettsia prowazekii is a bacteria that causes the disease typhus. Humans don't die of R. prowazekii (or "Rickettsia" as Talty insists inappropriately on calling it), they die of typhus; and typhus isn't alive, it's an illness resulting from infection. It's hard to take anything that pretends to be factual seriously when the author can't seem to take the trouble to understand the concepts he's writing about.

I have gotten side-tracked from the "over-written." There's a long setpiece after the Battle of Borodino about doctors performing amputations in field hospitals (which the author never bothers to link back to typhus), with descriptions of profiles being thrown onto walls by candlelight. Or at least, as Talty admits, they "would have been." ARGH. Don't make shit up just because you think it will sound cool! Go write a novel if that's what you wanted to do!

(And, I haven't checked if this already exists, but someone should absolutely write a novel about Prussian soldier Captain Röder, who is basically the hero of an adventure yarn as it is: the dude seems tough as nails, intelligent, romantic, pining, and beset by incident.)

As for reasoning, Talty admits that the French army surgeons didn't keep consistent records of the patients they treated, that they were unable to distinguish typhus from other febrile illnesses, that Napoleon didn't spend sufficient consideration on the extension of his supply lines so far into Russia, yet still somehow manages to attribute the death of everyone with a fever in Napoleon's army to typhus. After reading the book, I have the same conception of the situation that I had before: Napoleon's soldiers died of a lot of things in Russia, and one of them was typhus.

Talty also is seriously down on Kutuzov for abandoning Moscow to Napoleon, which seems like a stupidly misplaced criticism to me: after going on and on about how the Russians were out-fought by the French, and how costly and bloody and gruesome the battles were, why would Talty want Kutuzov to fight another? Instead the Russians lost buildings instead of thousands of human lives, and the French were unable to pursue the Russian army and were forced to retreat. Kutuzov's decision effectively ended the war: Napoleon left Russia, at great cost to himself and without gaining anything.

The... muddied logic? ignorance?... extends to the epilogue, which describes Charles Nicolle's work in Tunis where he identified the transmission method of typhus. Not to understate this enormous accomplishment, but that was all he did. He did not "isolate the pathogen" as Talty claims. I can't get over it. Talty describes Nicolle injecting a chimpanzee with blood from a human typhus patient, and then when the chimpanzee becomes ill, injecting a macaque with the chimpanzee's blood, and then when the macaque gets sick, Talty proclaims, "He had isolated the pathogen." Ugh. And then, when Nicolle injects two children with a mixture made of ground-up fleas from the macaque and the children fall ill but don't die, Talty announces, "The protocol was complete." ARGH. Ground-up fleas injected into two children are not a protocol! Charitably I assume Talty was eliding many steps in the process of medical research in order to make his story more digestible and, less forgivably, more dramatic, but this is a horrible thing to do; it's misleading at best, and dangerous when it convinces people to misunderstand vaccines or expect facile solutions to complex problems.

And this was the point at which I finally realized, too late, that this is not a history book; it's sensationalist journalism spun out to hundreds of pages.