period of the world-so long anterior to the great improvements made in modern times. That the medical faculty are by no means exempt from this weakness, is but too well known; they are afflicted with it just in proportion as their knowledge and talents are limited. The greatest physicians, like the greatest astronomers, have studied the ancients; they could not have done so without admiring them, and accordingly they do them homage as benefactors. This is true, for example, of Sydenham, Cullen, Hunter, Boerhaave, and Abernethy; men whose superior knowledge of the healing art is beyond question. Inferior physicians have also written on medicine; many do so at the present day; but what do they teach us?-what report do they make? If we are to believe them, the best who practised medicine before their time were but blunderers, although a few were doubtless very respectable, considering that they had the misfortune of living in a benighted age. Whatever their knowledge was, however, it was but ignorance compared to that of the physicians of the present day. follows, then, that if pestilences do not rage now as they used formerly, it is because the modern physician knows so much more than the ancient physician; nay, it would seem as if the plague and other malignant maladies were aware of this superiority on the part of our modern physicians, and therefore stayed away, knowing that they could not expect to obtain any foot-hold in the midst of so much knowledge! It None have higher respect for the medical faculty than we; and we could mention physicians in our principal cities who would compare favorably in professional knowledge and skill with the best in the world. At the same time, far from agreeing with the arrogant class of writers alluded to, we think that no science has been less improved by the moderns than that of medicine. If it were possible to confront the most learned physicians of Europe and America with Hippocrates, Galen, Aetius, Paulus Egenita, Aretæus and Celsus, we are convinced that the latter conld show that the boasted" modern improvements" are not of much importance after all, and that if epidemics do not rage now so destructively as they used formerly, it is not be cause modern physicians have a superior mode of treating them. Those who boast of the great progress made in medical science seem entirely to overlook the fact that epidemics have raged in the ancient as well as in the modern world at very unequal intervals. Sometimes centuries passed without any general epidemic of a particularly destructive character; at other times several epidemics occurred in the course of one century, nay, in the course of a decade. In all Greek literature we only read of two epidemics-one at Troy and the other at Athens. Homer beautifully alludes to the former in the first book of the Iliad,* and Thucydides graphically describes the latter.† We have also accounts of epidemics which occurred at Rome and Carthage alternatively; but the worst that mankind appear to have suffered from since the plagues of Egypt recorded in the Old Testament, were those of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. So late as the beginning of the eighteenth century (1720) the plague committed frightful ravages in Europe. If it has not since appeared in the West, it is by no means certain that it never will again, since it had previously been absent more than once for a much longer interval, and then raged with redoubled fury. That the advance of civilization exercises a powerful influence in staying the progress of epidemics, is beyond question; there is no better preventive of the spread of disease than cleanliness; nor can anything contribute more powerfully to disseminate an infectious or contagious disease than filthiness. This tact is proclaimed by writers of the present day as a great discovery, whereas it was insisted upon by Hippocrates more than two thousand years ago. Judging by the reports of modern Boards of Health, one would suppose that the virtue of cleanliness had never been thought of before their time; whereas the truth is, that far more attention was paid to it not only by the Greeks and Romans, but by the Jews of Moses' time. Each of the former had been * Lib. i. 50. De Bello Pelepon., lib. ii. VOL. XVII.-NO. XXXIV. 17 in the habit for ages of taking their daily baths. Those baths were provided at the public expense for all classes; none were so poor but that they could bathe daily, and those who failed to do so were stigmatized as filthy and lazy. But can this be said of the happy people of the present day? What proportion even of those called the respectable class bathe daily, or even weekly? It is to be presumed that those who take care to keep themselves clean, will not allow their residences or even streets to become filthy; it will be admitted at least that they are more likely to keep their houses and streets clean than those who are too indolent to wash themselves. Judged by this test, the Greeks and Romans should be regarded as at least as clean as any modern people. But we have not to depend on mere inference; sufficient of their works still remain to prove that they took far more care of the public health in their large cities than modern corporations do. Their system of sewerage alone would afford sufficient evidence on this point; let any one capable of the task compare it with certain systems in use at the present day, and then say how much we are indebted to modern improvements in cleanliness for the immunity which we enjoy from the desolating pestilences of former times. Those who thus reflect and examine the records of the past will readily admit that there are other causes for this immunity; that if we do not suffer as our ancestors did it is not because we are so vastly superior to them as our mutual admiration societies would have us believe. When Homer tells us that Apollo afflicted the Grecian army with a grievous pestilence because Agamemnon had insulted his priest, he simply means that the heat of the sun (Apollo) was unusually intense, that sanitary measures had been neglected in the Grecian camp, and that a pestilence was the result. In this allegorical language the poet embodies precisely the same views expressed by Hippocrates in his Aphorisms. Nor is this the only instance in which Homer illustrates the views of the father of medicine. In several instances the poet attributes epidemics to certain conditions of the atmosphere. Thus: Again: "As vapours blown by Anster's sultry breath, Pregnant with plagues, and shedding seeds of death, Pope's Translation, Book v. 1058. "Not half so dreadful rises to the sight, Through the thick gloom of some tempestuous night, And o'er the feebler stars exerts his rays: Terrific glory! for his burning breath Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death."* Ib., Book xxii. 37. Hippocrates also frequently indulges in metaphorical language; he occasionally speaks of the atmosphere as of a divinity, on account of the wonderful influence which it exercises on all nature. For this he is denounced by some of our modern sages as "superstitious," although Galen, who wrote nearly two thousand years ago, fully explains his meaning, proving that his great master was not superstitious, but that he was in the habit of using the term divine (rò deîv) in the sense of wonderful and admirable; not in the sense of inscrutable or hidden.† Cullen and Hunter understood Hippocrates in the same light; so does Sydenham, whom his countrymen style, not undeservedly, the modern Hippocrates. Like his master, the great English physician thought that the public health was much more dependent on atmospheric changes than on unusual heat, cold, or any other cause. "For the constitutions of different years," he says, "are various; yet they do not depend upon the degree of heat or cold, of dryness or humidity, which accompanies them, but probably result from some occult and inexplicable changes wrought in the bowels of the earth itself, by which the atmosphere is contaminated with certain effluvia, which pre ἀρίζηλοι δέ οἱ αὐγαὶ φαίνονται πολλοῖσι μετ' ἄστρασι νυκτὸς ἀμολγῷ· Ον τε κύν ̓ Ωρίωνος ἐπίκλησιν καλέουσιν Λαμπρότατος μὲν ὅγ' ἐστὶ κακὸν δέ τε σῆμα τέτυκται, Καί τε φέρει πολλὸν πυρετὸν δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσιν· Non quæcunque causas habent abditas et obscuras divina vocamus; sed ubi admirabilia videntur duntaxat. dispose the bodies of men to one or other form of disease. This predisposition continues during the prevalence of the same constitution, which in an uncertain period of time is superseded by another."* But to the philosophers of the present day nothing is "occult" or "inexplicable;" therefore Hippocrates, Galen, Sydenham, and others like them, who admit that there are some things which they do not understand, must be wrong! Be this as it may, it is certain that the testimony of all the great historians of ancient and modern times strongly favors the theory that the atmospheric influence is the most powerful in producing epidemics, for by no other theory can the fact be accounted for that pestilences frequently attack the lower animals before they attack man; and there have been not a few instances of the vegetable kingdom having been smitten with a general blight before any animals were known to suffer. In speaking of one of the great epidemics that prevailed at Rome, Livy tells us that "the pestilence which the year before had fallen on the cattle, in the present year attacked the human species. Such as were seized with it seldom survived the seventh day; those who did survive lingered under a tedious disorder which generally turned to a quartan ague. The mortality was greatest among the slaves, of whom heaps lay unburied on all the roads. Nor were there conductors of funerals sufficient to bury even the people of free condition. The bodies were consumed by putrefaction, without being touched by the dogs or vultures; and it was universally observed that during that and the previous year, while the mortality of cattle and men was so great, no vultures were anywhere to be seen." † The same historian speaks of several other epidemics whose characteristics fully sustain the views of Hippocrates as interpreted and sanctioned by Galen and Sydenham. Referring to the pestilence which broke out in both armies during the siege of Syracuse by Marcellus, 213 B. C., Livy tells us that it occurred not in the warm weather of summer, but in the *De Morbis Epidem., Sect. 1. cap. 2. Livy, lib. xli. c. 21. |