From 1625 to the time of the battle of Breitenfeld (1631) Saxony suffered terribly from pestilences that were caused and prolonged by the war, though by no means as terribly as in the years 1631–3. Dresden and Leipzig, comparatively speaking, were but slightly affected. Of 13,000 inhabitants that Dresden had in the year 1626, 341 succumbed to a plague which began in April and disappeared in December; the disease was called ‘burning fever’, ‘spotted fever’, and ‘pestilential spotted fever’, while in the records of the town council we find mention of ‘spots, often the size of a groschen, all over the body’, and also of ‘swellings’. Inasmuch as abscesses and gangrene are often observed in cases of typhus fever, it seems likely that it was that disease.[30] Of 14,500 inhabitants in Leipzig only 122 succumbed to it, although houses in all the streets were infected. Here again, accordingly, we see how slight the danger to life is in the case of typhus fever.
The western part of the present kingdom of Saxony suffered considerably more than the eastern part. In the year 1625 plagues broke out in the cities of Plauen, Reichenbach (1,000 deaths), and Zwickau; the last-named city was revisited in June 1626, and between then and the end of the year 216 people died there. Pestilence also broke out in the vicinity of Leipzig in 1626—in Borna (70 deaths), in Grimma (350 deaths), and in Wurzen, where it appeared in August. The following places nearer Dresden were also the scenes of plagues that year: Rosswein (near Döbeln—376 deaths), Mitweida (outbreak on April 9, 1626—number of deaths before that day 22, between that day and the end of the year, 1,000), Frankenberg (581 deaths), Freiberg (752 deaths in the year 1626—500 of them due to the plague). The village of Dohna, south of Dresden, is also mentioned; in the year 1626 there were 157 deaths there, as compared with an average annual mortality of 60. In the Erzgebirge plagues appeared in various places in the year 1625; 134 people died in Annaberg and 323 people in Zöblitz. In 1626 there were 205 deaths in Schwarzenberg, 178 deaths in Gottesgabe, and 81 deaths in Breitenbrunn. Two towns in eastern Saxony, Bischofswerda and Zittau, are also mentioned; there were 182 deaths in the former in the year 1625.