the rich many died, and some quite suddenly, of this strange disease, in the treatment of which the physicians shortened life not a little by their purgative treatment and phlebotomy, seeking an excuse for their ignorance in the influence of the constellations, and alleging that astral diseases were beyond the reach of human art[474]. From this prejudicial effect of our chief antiphlogistic remedy, bleeding, as well as of evacuations from the bowels, we may conclude that the disease, though in its commencement rheumatic, yet had an essential tendency to produce relaxation and debility of the nerves, and in this respect, as well as in its extension to all classes, accorded with the modern influenzas, in which the same phenomena have manifested themselves only much less vividly and plainly. The French, who, from the levity of their character, have always called serious things by jocose names, designate this disease “Coqueluche” (the monk’s hood), because, owing to the extreme sensibility of the skin to cold and currents of air, this kind of hood was generally necessary, and was a protection against an attack of the malady, as well as against its increase. That in the accounts, which are, to be sure, very incomplete, there should be no express mention of any affection of the air-passages, is remarkable, since this could not in all likelihood have failed to exist; although it might perhaps have been only slightly manifested. Nearly a century before (1414), this affection appeared far more prominently on the occurrence of a no less general disorder of the same kind; so that all those who had the complaint, suffered from a considerable hoarseness, and all public business in Paris was interrupted on this account[475]. It was on that very occasion that the name Coqueluche was first employed, and this having, as is well known, been transferred to the whooping-cough, it is easier to suppose, with respect to the influenza of 1510, which was similarly named, an omission in the account, than the real absence of a symptom so very generally prevalent; for in these kinds of comparisons and denominations, the common sense of the people errs much less than the learned profundity of political historians.