There are two circumstances which, in my opinion, prove that lues originated in America; the first is, the multitude of authors, both medical and surgical, of the sixteenth century, who attest the fact; and the second is, the silence of all the physicians and all the poets of antiquity, who never were acquainted with this disease, and never had even a name for it. I here speak of the silence of physicians and of poets as equally demonstrative. The former, beginning with Hippocrates, would not have failed to describe this malady, to state its symptoms, to apply to it a name, and suggest some remedy. The poets, equally as malicious and sarcastic as physicians are studious and investigative, would have detailed in their satires, with minute particularity, all the symptoms and consequences of this dreadful disorder; you do not find, however, a single verse in Horace or Catullus, in Martial or Juvenal, which has the slightest reference to lues, although they expatiate on all the effects of debauchery with the utmost freedom and delight. It is very certain that smallpox was not known to the Romans before the sixth century; that the American lues was not introduced into Europe until the fifteenth century; and that leprosy is as different from those two maladies, as palsy from St. Guy's or St. Vitus' dance. Leprosy was a scabious disease of a dreadful character. The Jews were more subject to it than any other people living in hot climates, because they had neither linen, nor domestic baths. These people were so negligent of cleanliness and the decencies of life that their legislators were obliged to make a law to compel them even to wash their hands. All that we gained in the end by engaging in the crusades, was leprosy; and of all that we had taken, that was the only thing that remained with us. It was necessary everywhere to build lazarettos, in which to confine the unfortunate victims of a disease at once pestilential and incurable.