It Was Safer on The Battlefield Than in The Camp

Sometimes in life you see statistics that run counter to what our intuition tells us. Jerry Seinfeld in his pre-"Seinfeld" routine has a joke where he says:

"In a recent survey of adult Americans the number 1 fear was public speaking. The number 2 fear was death! Death was the number 2 fear!?!? That means at a funeral people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy!"

Many Americans (at least those with a sense of our History) are aware that the Civil War was the bloodiest war in American History (over 600,000 men, and by some estimates as many as 700,000 men died). That's somewhat misleading since it's also the only war where the US fought itself, but the statistic is still no less valid. What many people do not know is that 2/3rds of the deaths (TWO-THIRDS) were from disease! That number does not include deaths from infections resulting from battlefield injuries (those are included in the 1/3rd portion of the deaths). That's remarkable. For all of the carnage in the Civil War (Antietam is still the single bloodiest day in American History -- 3600 Americans lost their lives) disease was more of a problem than anything else.

Of course this isn't anything new. It's really only recently that man has devised ways to kill himself more efficiently than disease. In World War I ~19M people died (that number is almost unfathomable to begin with). It also marked the first time that civilian deaths outnumbered military deaths. However Mother Nature proved to be vastly more deadly. The Spanish Influenza of 1918-1920 killed anywhere from 40M-100M people (2%-5% of the World population!). Unlike many deadly strains of influenzas this one was deadly to young healthy people as well. It killed over 25M people in the first 6 months of the outbreak (in contrast AIDS took 25 years to kill that many people).