Disease

       With malnourishment and famine rampantly tearing across Europe, the stage was set for an accompaniment of Disease. Cold weather and bad harvests led to an increase of beggars across Europe, and especially damp conditions combined with poor food quality bred disease amidst these crowds. Typhus infected over 2.5 million Europeans between 1816 and 1819, and killed upwards of 65,000 (Wood & De Jong Boers). The pressure that the combination of famine and disease put on governments actually played a key role in improving the administrative function in many European states. The best example of this can be found in Germany, which had recently been condensed from hundreds of states into 39 states that made up the German Federation. Because of the economic pressure that the Tambora crisis applied, many German States needed funding (Behringer, ch.1). One point of the Vienna Congress was that each state needed to draft a constitution before receiving any aid. Thus, the German States rushed to draft their constitutions and establish functioning governments in order to obtain assistance throughout the period of famine and disease (Kramer). 

     Although disease is a tragic consequence of the weather patterns that Tambora enacted, what is more tragic is that this situation was in no way unique to Europe. In Asia, a particularly turbulent monsoon season had catastrophic consequences on a global scale. Particularly, India’s monsoon season dramatically worsened a Cholera outbreak that had origins in the     Ganges river near Calcutta. This Cholera outbreak was in fact the first ever recorded Cholera outbreak, and what would have likely been a local outbreak without the abnormal weather patterns quickly spread throughout Asia into a full blown pandemic. The Cholera epidemic spread through monsoons and ocean swells to China, Japan, Sumatra, and even came full circle back to the Tambora region of Indonesia, making its way to Sumbawa, Java, and Bali. In fact, Cholera on the island of Java alone killed nearly 100,000 people, roughly the amount that were killed from the eruption of Tambora and the few days that followed (De Jong Boers, 37-51). While nature spread the disease overseas, man spread it across the Middle East and Asia into Oman and as far North as Russia. Ironically, what prevented the disease from spreading into Europe were the particularly cold weather conditions being experienced around the Caspian Sea due to the thick presence of volcanic ash. Essentially, while the weather effects of Tambora brought the Typhus plague to Europe, those same conditions were precisely what spared Europe from Cholera.