The Struggle for Survival 193The few well-qualified doctors, most of whom were foreigners, preferred to
stay in the capital, where only senior officers or guardsmen were likely to
benefit from their presence. Ordinary soldiers, and indeed their officers too, in
line regiments usually had to be content with the ministratiom of ?. b!!.rber
(rsyryul mk) or medical orderly (je/'dsher), who had neither the knowledge
nor the facilities to cater adequately to their needs. When troops were sent to
fight in the southern steppes, where plague (chuma), typhus, and other infec-
tious diseases were rife, the results were often catastrophic. In the 1730s
Mtinnich's armies were decimated by epidemics. Foreigners were struck by the
sight of long columns of carts laden with casualcies crossing the plain.^109 'Com-
monly one third of the sick die', noted one colonel in Russian service; 'there is
to each regiment but one head surgeon and his assistant, who are withal not of
the most skilful. •^110
Losses were far heavier in the Seven Years War, although according to one
recent student proportionately less than those of the enemy, since the Russians
took the trouble to recover their wounded from the battlefield; they also set up
mobile field hospitals to give first aid before evacuation to the rear.^111
However, conditions in these establishments may be gauged from a description
of the principal army hospital in Moscow by a senior official who visited it in
the line of duty:
When we crossed the threshold ... into the first ward, we were met by ... a foul stench.
Suddenly my eyes made out a multitude of sufferers, some in their last torments, others
tossing unconscious from fever or crying out wildly from unbearable pain, yet others
trembling with cold and calling for death to relieve them.^112
It may be characteristic that in this memoir the General War Commissar,
whose functions included supervision of the medical services, should have con-
centrated on his own emotional response to an extreme situation rather than
on the practical measures which he took to cope with it: although an educated
and humane individual, Shakhovskoy had not been touched by the spirit of the
Enlightenment.
By Catherine's reign new intellectual influences did make themselves felt in
this sphere. In the Balkan theatre-whence, however, the plague was trans-
mitted to Moscow in 1771 by returning troops, with great loss of life'^13 -some
unit commanders showed a proper concern for hygienic precautions, and
would for example order their men to bathe in vinegar.^114 But medical person-
nel and facilities were still woefully short. In 1776 the army apparently had
a total of 42 doctors or 'staff surgeons' (shtab-/ekari) and 406 ordinary
109 Kersnovsky, /storiya, i. 74.
I IO Manstein, Contemporary Memoirs, p. 171.
111 Muller-Dietz, M1/itiirarzt. p. 40.
112 Shakhovskoy. Zapiski. p. 88.
111 For a full accounl of the plague, see J. T. Alexander. Buhonic Plafl,ue in Early Modern
Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster, Baltimore, 1980.
114 Glinoyetsky, 'lnstruktsiya ... Voront~ova', p. ~4. ~ 2; Duhro•in, Suvorov, p. 74.