HISTORY.--Certain passages in the writings of Hippocrates have been appealed to by Murchison and other physicians in support of the opinion that typhoid fever was a disease of at least occasional occurrence in ancient times; but, although from the nature of its causes it is probable that it has occurred in all ages and wherever men have congregated in towns and villages, the descriptions given by the Father of Medicine in the passages alluded to are not sufficiently full to render it at all certain that typhoid fever had ever come under his observation. Indeed, there is no author of an earlier date than Spigelius[1] whose writings furnish any positive evidence that he ever met with the disease. Spigelius, however, in spite of the doubt thrown upon his observation by Hirsch,[2] would seem to have had opportunities for examining the bodies of those who had died of it, since he gives an account of several autopsies, in which he says that the small intestine was inflamed and that that part of it next to the cæcum and colon was frequently sphacelated. Panarolus[3] also says that the intestines had the appearance of being cauterized ("apparebant tanquam exusta") in some cases observed by him in Rome a little later in the same century. Willis[4] would certainly appear to have been familiar with two forms of fever, which, from the description he gives of them, could have been nothing else but typhoid and typhus fevers. Sydenham[5] also described a fever in which the prominent symptoms were diarrhoea, vomiting, delirium, a tendency to coma, and epistaxis, and which was distinguishable from the febris pestilens by the absence of a petechial eruption. Baglivi[6] of Rome in the latter part of the seventeenth century described the hæmitritæus of previous writers {239} under the title of febris mesenterica, and maintained that it was always accompanied by and dependent on inflammation of the intestines and enlargement of the mesenteric glands. A similar observation was made soon after by Hoffmann,[7] and by Lancisi[8] in 1718. The latter seems to have fully recognized the characteristics of the eruption, for he says that it consisted of "elevated papules which disappeared completely on pressure." In 1759, Huxham described, under the title "slow, nervous fever," a disease which there can be no doubt was typhoid fever. He moreover pointed out very clearly the distinctions between this disease and another to which he gave the name of "putrid, malignant, petechial fever," and which was unquestionably typhus. Sir Richard Manningham[9] also described typhoid fever under the title of "febricula, or little fever." In the preface of his work he calls attention to its insidious origin, and to the fact that its gravity was often underrated at its commencement, "till, at length, more conspicuous and very terrible symptoms arise, and then the Physician is sent for in the greatest hurry, and happy for the Patient if the