The pandemic effect: While digital apps evolve to keep us all connected during the Covid-19 pandemic, we look at what technologies and trends have emerged from previous waves of disease through the ages

DURING THE Crimean War, it was said that you were safer on the battlefield than in hospital. At the sharp end of the armed conflict, you at least had some chance of survival. But in the converted military barracks at Scutari that served as a field hospital, you had virtually none. Back in the mid-19th century conflict on the Black Sea, medical facilities were so rudimentary and sanitary conditions so appalling that the mortality statistics make grim reading. Of the 21,827 British troops that fell in the war, 4,602 were either killed in action or died of wounds, while 17,225 died of infectious diseases such as typhus, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery. Four times as many men died of disease as from battle wounds.