Although many agree that war is no laughing matter, and that there is no such thing as a just war, there are many reasons on why referring to the Spanish-American War as a “splendid little war” could be considered quite accurate. One reason is that although the war was waged against what was once considered one of the world’s largest empires, with a military that had at one time conquered and subdued a large portion of the new world, there were only around 3,000 American casualties that occurred during the short war, and only 380 of those deaths were from combat. Most of the deaths had occurred from something the Americans couldn’t really defend themselves against, which was disease. In the era in which the war was fought, deadly diseases,