There is some reason to believe that Hippocrates himself, our professional father, who drew up that oath by which all modern doctors measure their conduct, knew the bubonic plague when he saw it, though he never went through a plague epidemic. The first epidemic of which we have detailed knowledge is the great plague of Athens in the Peloponnesian War about which there can be very little doubt, for it was described by one of the greatest literary artists of Greece, who saw it all with his own eyes, and suffered from it. Thucydides was not a doctor, but like Cervantes he had the eye and mind of a doctor; and he could describe a disease so plainly that many other ancient and even mediæval historians have taken their descriptions of their own epidemics straight from his with never an acknowledgment. And in Thucydides’ account of that plague we get the invariable conditions of all epidemics—the ungovernable terror of the people, the powerlessness of the doctors, the abandonment of all moral laws, the wild accusations of poisoning by enemies, the selfishness, cowardice, and ignorance of man in a panic, the hysterical dancing in the shadow of the tomb. From this one learn all. I give a translation of Thucydides’ description of the symptoms, by C. Foster Smith. It must be remembered that Athens was being besieged and the Athenians had brought all the farmers into Athens so that the Spartans should find no food for the Lacedæmonian armies; the device of an already beaten nation. “The disease began in Ethiopia and then descended into Egypt and Libia. Then it suddenly fell upon the Piræus and city of Athens, so that people at first said that the Peloponnesians had put poison into the cisterns. Afterwards it reached the upper city also, and from that time the mortality became greater. I have had the disease myself and seen others sick of it. Suddenly men were seized first with an intense heat of the head and redness and inflammation of the eyes, and the parts inside the mouth became bloodshot and exhaled an unnatural and fœtid breath. In the next stage sneezing and hoarseness came on and in a short time the disorder descended to the chest attended by severe coughing and sneezing. There was severe vomiting of every kind attended by great distress; and in most cases ineffectual retching producing violent convulsions which sometimes abated directly, sometimes not very long afterwards. The body was not very hot to the touch; it was not pale, but reddish, livid, and breaking out into small blisters and ulcers. Patients could not bear to have on them the slightest covering or linen sheets, but wanted to be quite uncovered and would have liked best to throw themselves into cold water—indeed, many who were not prevented did so. Most of them died on the seventh or ninth day from internal heat, but had still some strength left. After the crisis the disease sometimes attacked the privates and fingers and toes, so that many patients lost these,