The existing calendar of diseases, studied in connection with the
classical history of the diseases written for us by the longest
unbroken line of authorities in the world of letters, shows, in
unmistakable language, that the imposition of every known malady of
man is coeval with every phase of his recorded life on the planet. No
malady, once originated, has ever actually died out; many remain as
potent as ever. That wasting fatal scourge, pulmonary consumption, is
the same in character as when Coelius Aurelianus gave it description.
The cancer of to-day is the cancer known to Paulus Eginæta. The Black
Death, though its name is gone, lingers in malignant typhus. The great
plague of Athens is the modern great plague of England, scarlet fever.
The dancing mania of the Middle Ages and the convulsionary epidemic
of Montmartre, subdued in their violence, are still to be seen in
some American communities, and even at this hour in the New Forest
of England. Small-pox, when the blessed protection of vaccination is
withdrawn, is the same virulent destroyer as it was when the Arabian
Rhazes defined it. Ague lurks yet in our own island, and, albeit the
physician is not enriched by it, is in no symptom changed from the
ague that Celsus knew so well. Cholera, in its modern representation
is more terrible a malady than its ancient type, in so far as we have
knowledge of it from ancient learning. And that fearful scourge,
the great plague of Constantinople, the plague of hallucination and
convulsion which raged in the Fifth Century of our era, has in
our time, under the new names of tetanoid fever and cerebro-spinal
meningitis, been met with here and in France, and in Massachusetts
has, in the year 1873, laid 747 victims in the dust.
I must cease these illustrations, though I could extend them fairly
over the whole chapter of disease, past and present. Suffice it if I
have proved the general propositions, that disease is now as it was in
the beginning, except that in some examples of it it is less virulent;
that the science for extinguishing any one disease has yet to
be learned; that, as the bases of disease exist, untouched by
civilisation, so the danger of disease is ever imminent, unless we
specially provide against it; that the development of disease may
occur with original virulence and fatality, and may at any moment be
made active under accidental or systematic ignorance.
A CITY OF HEALTH.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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