Thus it plainly appears that the profuse perspiration in the disease of which we are treating, notwithstanding its apparently injurious tendency, was the result of a commotion excited on the part of the lungs, which was critical with respect to the disease itself; and this is in accordance with all the causes of which we still have any knowledge. Noxious and even stinking fogs penetrated into the organs of respiration, and as the blood was thus so much affected in its composition and in its vitality that its corrupt state was only to be obviated by profuse perspiration, the inevitable consequence was an interference with the extensive functions of the eighth pair of nerves, which interference, as later writers relate, extended in many cases to the spinal marrow, and brought on violent convulsions[400]. We have here only one essential cause, out of many, for this gigantic disease, and one too which accounts for its advance and spread. It is highly probable, for the reasons stated, and as according with all human experience, that it first broke out in the army of Henry the VIIth, and beyond all doubt that it spread from west to east, and afterwards in a retrograde course from east to west. With the perfectly equable operation of the predisposing causes, from which the disease ought indubitably to have broken out all over England at the same time, had the condition of the atmosphere been its sole occasion, we must additionally presume a special cause for its progress through towns and villages. This, according to all appearance, was to be found in the air, impregnated with foul odours, which surrounded the sick, and abounded in the tents and dwellings in which Henry the VIIth’s soldiers, after various privations and hard service, amid storms and rain, were closely crowded together. Of both causes modern observation furnishes analogous examples. Intermittent fevers spread more easily in air which is contaminated by sick people, and bands of soldiers, themselves in perfect health, have not unfrequently conveyed camp fever to remote places. It signifies very little by what expressions of the schools these occurrences are designated; it is best perhaps to abstain from them altogether, for they are all inadequate, and occasion misconceptions. Contemporaries, however, were certainly justified in not admitting the notion of contagion in the same sense as when the term is applied to the plague, with which they were well acquainted[401]. For very frequently cases which were not to be explained on the principle of contagion communicated by persons diseased, occurred among people of rank, and manifestly arose independently of the usual causes. In these cases the fear of death, which everywhere was the harbinger of the disease, and threw the nerves of the chest into spasmodic commotion, gave an impulse to the malady for which the quality of the atmosphere and luxury had long made preparation. Had this view of contemporaries been even less impartial