though some lost the eyes also. Immediately after recovery there was often loss of memory, so that many failed to remember either themselves or their friends. The most dreadful thing was the despondency of the victims.” I am glad to say that I personally did not serve in the Balkan campaigns, but many doctors who did tell me that Thucydides’ description might, with a little imagination, be stretched to include that plague which proved so distressing to Dr. Elsie Inglis and her gallant band. In other words, Thucydides was describing typhus fever, which has always been the enemy of besieged cities, especially in hot and dirty surroundings. Dr. Crawfurd states that we may look upon it as almost certain that the plague of Athens was typhus fever, though he discusses at considerable length the academic question whether it might not have been bubonic plague or smallpox. At least we can say for certain that the plague of Athens showed more of the symptoms of typhus fever than of any other known disease; and if Dr. Crawfurd is wrong he had made a very shrewd guess. From my own experience of typhus, which is small, I should certainly be inclined to support him. But typhus nowadays is a thing almost of the past except in times of war. That we owe simply to washing ourselves and our clothes better than of old. It is a remarkable thing in clinical experience that typhus frequently accompanies bubonic plague, because they are both diseases of primitive civilisations like India and China to-day. Passing over the innumerable ancient attacks of pestilence upon mankind, we come to the great plague of the Antonines which was probably the real cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, for it is extremely doubtful whether the Empire ever recovered from it. To most of us this plague is remarkable for the fact that Galen, the Roman Hippocrates, ran away from it, and has left us an account of it which seems to have been drawn second-hand from Thucydides. In the Roman Empire many of the physicians were Greek slaves and had the slave mind. Though Galen himself was not a slave, still he was a man of his time, and it was not then thought imperative that a doctor should, in Dr. Crawfurd’s words, be “captain of his soul.”[17] Dr. Crawfurd gives many instances of honoured names whose owners ran before the onset of plague; and it was not till the Black Death that we find the real true silent courage that we now expect from the medical profession as a matter of course.