"Lice, which spread typhus, were endemic, but perhaps the most infamous and preventable infections and diseases of the time were dysentery and typhoid fever. According to the accounts of both Union and Confederate officers, soldiers were resistant to even what little information the time period could provide about hygiene and sanitary practices. Confederate General Robert E. Lee tried without success to get his soldiers to bathe regularly to limit the spread of lice, but he recorded that soldiers were “worse than children [at keeping clean], for the latter can be forced.” As the years of the epically miserable war ticked by, weary soldiers increasingly took to defecating wherever convenient in their camps. Without knowledge of the basics of germ theory, they routinely relieved themselves in their own water supplies. One army surgeon at the Battle of Vicksburg said that by late 1863, the soldiers had given up so much on basic hygiene that “human excrement has been promiscuously deposited in every direction.” This pattern caused regular outbreaks of dysentery, cholera and typhoid fever that sparked cliches still in use today: the troops most susceptible to these diarrhea-inducing ailments were said not to have the “guts” for soldiering."