epidemics_. The most recent example is still fresh in our memories. The influenza of 1831 was immediately followed by the Indian cholera, and scarcely had this, after its revival in Eastern and central Europe, vanished, when the influenza of 1833 appeared, as if to announce a general peace. After the influenza of 1510, a plague followed in the north of Europe, which in Denmark carried off the son of King John[481]; 1551 was the year of the fifth epidemic sweating sickness. In 1557, the influenza in Holland, was followed by a bubo plague, which lasted the following year, and carried off 5000 of the inhabitants at Delft[482]. In 1564, a very destructive plague raged in Spain, of which 10,000 people died at Barcelona, and finally, in 1580, the last year of influenza in that century, a plague of which 40,000 died in Paris, appeared over the greater part of Europe and in Egypt[483]. SECT. 7.—EPIDEMICS OF 1517. We now revert to the year 1517, and shall consider the epidemics which accompanied the English sweating sickness. First of all, the _Hauptkrankheit_, that brain fever which so often recurred in the central parts of Europe, appeared extensively throughout Germany. Many died of this dangerous disease, and we are assured by contemporaries that other inter-current inflammatory fevers were also very fatal[484]. Such was the case in Germany, the heart of Europe. Another disease, however, much more important, and till that time wholly unknown to medical men, appeared in Holland, which broke out in January, 1517, and from its dangerous and quite inexplicable symptoms, spread fear and horror around. It was a malignant, and, according to the assurance of a very respectable medical eye-witness, an infectious inflammation of the throat, so rapid in its course that, unless assistance were procured within the first eight hours, the patient was past all hope of recovery before the close of the day. Sudden pains in the throat, and violent oppression of the chest, especially in the region of the heart, threatened suffocation, and at length actually produced it. During the paroxysms the muscles of the throat and chest were seized with violent spasm, and there were but short intervals of alleviation before a repetition of such seizures terminated in death. Unattended by any premonitory symptoms, the disease began with a severe catarrhal affection of the chest, which speedily advanced to inflammation of the air passages, and where death did not occur on the day of the attack, ran on to a dangerous inflammation of the lungs, which followed the usual course, but was accompanied by a very high fever. Occasionally a less perilous transition into intermittent fever was observed, but in no case did a sudden recovery take place; for even when the fever subsided, the patient continued to suffer, for at least a month, from pain in the stomach and great debility, which symptoms admit of easy