Thus ended the epidemic of leprosy in France, which had prevailed from the second century, observing the same progress in other countries of Western Europe during the same period of time. Syphilis, the product of the venereal maladies of antiquity and the leprosy of the Middle Ages, announced a new era; syphilis was thus contemporaneous with the _Renaissance_. In the collection of Guy Patin’s letters, there is an interesting document relating to the connection of leprosy and syphilis, as witness the principal passage: “It was not long since that I saw in Auvergne a patient who was suspected of measles (_hog disease_), for the reason that his family had the reputation of being thus afflicted, though he bore on his body no marks of the disease. This led me to recall the fact that some families in Paris have been suspected of this taint; but really we have no measles or leprosy here. In former times there was a hospital dedicated to such cases in the Faubourg Saint Denis. I have noticed no cases in Champagne, Normandy nor Picardy, although in all these Provinces I found asylums formerly used for such cases that are now turned into hospitals for plague victims. In former times leprosy was confounded with pox, through the ignorance of doctors and the barbarity of the age; nevertheless, there are yet a few lepers in Provence, Languedoc and Poitou.” We have here the authority of Guy Patin for saying that leprosy had almost entirely disappeared from France in the sixteenth century. Although modern Faculties are prone to insist that the real science of medicine only dates back its origin to the discovery of the microscope, and that the study of antique medicine is only a retrospective exposition calculated to show the slight scientific value of ancient observations, I assert that the many observations recorded by our medical ancestors are of immense value. Let us cite, as a single instance, this transformation of a constitutional malady, attenuated by time, transmitted by heredity through the same masses of people for ten centuries,—populations having a similar diathesis,—a disease taking a new vigor and attacking other generations, but destined in a given time to disappear, most probably, in its turn, in another unknown metamorphosis. Such an idea may cause a smile in that haughty _section hors rang_ in medicine, which is so devoted to the culture of specific germs that but one idea can certainly be adopted as an irrefutable dogma in medicine—that is, if the facts it represents coincide with the modifications of the wag—in the tail end of a bacillus. As for myself, I remain convinced that everything seen in modern times, through the objective even of an instrument of precision, cannot destroy the accumulated work of twenty centuries of medical observation and study. _Scientiæ enim per additamenta fiunt._ THE SYPHILIS.