Others,
especially those of strong constitution, would become melancholy and commit
suicide. The number of deaths increased from day to day.
Marvelous was the effect of emotion on the disease. Surgeon-General von
Kohlreuter, during and after the battle of Smolensk, witnessed this
influence. Of four thousand Wuerttembergians who took part in that battle,
there were few quite free from dysentery.
Tired and depressed, the army dragged along; but as soon as the soldiers
heard the cannon in the distance, telling them the battle was beginning,
they emerged at once from their lethargy; the expression of their faces,
which had been one of sadness, changed to one of joy and hilarity. Joyfully
and with great bravery they went into action. During the four days that the
battle lasted, and for some days afterward, dysentery disappeared as if
banished by magic. When the battle was over and the privations were the
same again as they had been, the disease returned with the same severity as
before--nay, even worse, and the soldiers fell into complete lethargy.
The necropsy of those who had died from dysentery revealed derangement of
the digestive organs; the stomach, the large intestine, mostly the rectum,
were inflamed; the intima of stomach and duodenum, sometime the whole
intestine, were atonic. In some cases there were small ulcers, with jagged
margins, in the stomach, especially in its fundus, and in the rectum; in
other cases dysentery had proceeded to such an extent that pretty large
ulcers had developed, extending from the stomach into the small and from
there into the large intestine, into the rectum.
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