When starvation occurs upon a large scale, affecting a community with famine, pestilence is sure to accompany it. Disease has always been rampant in Ireland when the potato crops have failed, and in India when the grain supply has given out. Much of the illness which occurred in the early history of the Crimea was due to insufficient food, and in the Middle Ages the ravages of pestilential diseases, such as typhus, smallpox, the plague, etc., were always worst in times of general starvation. The history of epochs of famine in siege or otherwise is always accompanied by outbreaks of violence, for hunger begets ill-temper, vice, and crime. This has occurred of late years, notably in Athens, Florence, and London, and in Paris during the Commune.

Nothing predisposes man so much to all forms of infectious disease as starvation and inanition. This is so well known that physicians and nurses in charge of contagious cases are particularly cautioned to eat well and not expose themselves to infection while suffering from fatigue and lack of food.