Posted by:
D. Lamb
(
)
Date: October 29, 2010 07:59PM
Since the other post was getting to long I thought I'd add this.
Disease or sickness is rarely mentioned in the Book of Mormon. When it is mentioned, it occurs only in about 5 or 6 verses of the entire BOM and never in the context of warfare.
Historically disease has been endemic during war time. The BOM mentions war and battles numerous times. During the American Civil War, disease killed 2 out of 3 Confederate soldiers and roughly 3 out of 5 of the Union soldiers.
The Civil War was fought, claimed the Union army surgeon general, "at the end of the medical Middle Ages." Little was known about what caused disease, how to stop it from spreading, or how to cure it. Surgical techniques ranged from the barbaric to the barely competent.
While the average soldier believed the bullet was his most nefarious foe, disease was the biggest killer of the war… About half of the deaths from disease during the Civil War were caused by intestinal disorders, mainly typhoid fever, diarrhea, and dysentery. The remainder died from pneumonia and tuberculosis. Camps populated by young soldiers who had never before been exposed to a large variety of common contagious diseases were plagued by outbreaks of measles, chickenpox, mumps, and whooping cough.
The culprit in most cases of wartime illness, however, was the shocking filth of the army camp itself. An inspector in late 1861 found most Federal camps 'littered with refuse, food, and other rubbish, sometimes in an offensive state of decomposition; slops deposited in pits within the camp limits or thrown out of broadcast; heaps of manure and offal close to the camp." As a result, bacteria and viruses spread through the camp like wildfire.
Bowel disorders constituted the soldiers' most common complaint. The Union army reported that more than 995 out of every 1,000 men eventually contracted chronic diarrhea or dysentery during the war; the Confederates fared no better.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/civilwarmedicine.htmThis is more evidence that the BOM was written by Joseph Smith and his cohorts, Sydney Rigdon et al. It shows their shortsightedness in not including one of the most common elements of war---DISEASE.
The BOM merely mentions affliction in one instance which I was able to find, which was on a mormon website and showed the synonym as adversity.
Has anybody else not found it odd that the BOM never mentions such a prominent element of warfare?