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As far as I know, this is the first use of this idea; note that it also includes one of the basic ideas behind modern biological warfare. A disease that is not incapacitating is altered to become deadly.

The decisive moment had arrived. After working all night to position the batteries, at dawn on the sixth day the chemists and the offensive medical corps covered the enemy-occupied area with smoke canisters and miasma shells. The enemy retaliated as vigorously as they could; but their canisters, spread over the very wide perimeter of the attack, had little effect. It soon became clear that, in a real battle, the enemy, overwhelmed by the asphyxiating gases of the chemists and the rapidly acting, noxious vapors of the offensive medical corps, would have been quickly and definitively incapacitated. (Miasma Shells - from Le Vingetieme Siecle - La Vie electrique) We certainly have much better options with our impressive catalog of varied explosives, which, admittedly, are starting to show their age. Don't we possess a range of asphyxiating and paralyzing gases, convenient to send through tubes over short distances or via lightweight shells—simple canisters easily aimed 30 or 40 kilometers from our electric guns! And the miasmatic artillery of the offensive medical corps ! It's still being organized, but its formidable miasma canisters and shells of various microbes are beginning to be appreciated... (Miasmic War Equipment - from Le Vingetieme Siecle - La Vie electrique) ...The time seems to me no have come to make medical war. No more explosives or miasmas! We’ve already begun, as you know, since we include an Offensive Medical Corps in our army, provided with a small artillery of noxious miasmas, but that’s only a trial—a timid trial! Our Offensive Medical Corps hasn’t yet served any serious purpose… and yet, Messieurs, that’s the future! On every side, the scientists are searching; migranite, the indisposition that no one has been able to escape, is a proof of it: migranite was launched against us by an enemy nation. “Before long, no one will any longer fight with any means other than miasmas. I shall conduct my research in the utmost secrecy, and in two years I shall have transformed the art of war completely. No more weapons—or, at least only enough as are necessary to reap the fruits of the action of the Offensive Medical Corps. “Let’s suppose that we’re in a state of war with some nation or other: I cover that nation with choice miasmas; I spread whatever combination of maladies I please—and the army auxiliary to the Medical Corps has only to present itself and impose the conditions of peace upon that entirely disease-stricken nation. It’s simple, it’s easy and it’s humane... “When our Offensive Medical Corps alone will be ready, you’ll no longer see those frightful hecatombs of young and healthy individuals that every conflict of peoples provided during the eras of gunpowder and explosives. What is the objective of a general on the day of a battle? It’s a matter of putting as many enemies as possible in a state in which they cannot harm his troops or impede their forward march, isn’t it? Until now, it has been necessary in order to do that, to resort to ferocious slaughter, by means of cannon, explosives and chemical products—asphyxiating gases and so on. Well, when I’ve mastered all the procedures, I’ll take responsibility for lying all the armies that the enemy launches at us flat on the ground, just as sick as I want them to be, incapable of lifting a finger for some time.

Technovelgy from Le Vingtième Siècle: La Vie Électrique, by Albert Robida. Published by Corbeil in 1892 Additional resources -

The Offensive Medical Corp may even enhance the effects of ordinary diseases:

"The matter of migraitis will be clarified by the commission of doctors charged with studying its effects and tracing it back to its causes," said one of the politicians; "it is already permissible to suspect that it is due to the malice of a foreign nation which, by means we are on the verge of discovering, by electrical currents charged with carefully prepared miasmas, sent us this unknown disease, manufactured from scratch, so to speak, a disease that was initially benign and merely bothersome, but which quickly became, in certain cases, depending on the terrain where it appeared, malignant and disastrous! But this must remain between us, gentlemen; it is a matter of politics, it is the government's business to take, one day, such retaliatory measures as it deems appropriate."

Compare to biological warfare from The War of the Worlds (1898) by HG Wells.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Le Vingtième Siècle: La Vie Électrique
  More Ideas and Technology by Albert Robida
  Tech news articles related to Le Vingtième Siècle: La Vie Électrique
  Tech news articles related to works by Albert Robida

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