The stock of provisions was already so far consumed in the first year that people made bread of acorns, and sought with avidity all kinds of harmless roots, merely to appease hunger. These miserable sufferers wandered about, houseless and more like corpses than living beings, and finally, failing even to excite commiseration, perished on dunghills or in out-houses. The larger towns shut their gates against them, and the various charitable institutions proved, of necessity, insufficient to afford relief in this frightful extremity! It was the lot of very few to obtain the tender care and attendance of the Sisters of Charity. In most of those affected their livid swollen countenances, and the dropsical swelling of their limbs, betrayed the sickly condition in which they dragged on their languishing existence. Every one fled from these pestiferous spectres, for they were saturated with the poison of this deadly disease, and the remark was no doubt made a thousand times over, that this poison might be conveyed to persons in health without affecting the carrier, since want and ill health occasionally afford a miserable protection against disease of this kind[524]. The necessary data for furnishing a complete account of the Trousse-galant of 1528 do not exist, for physicians passed over this epidemic with the same coolness and indifference which unfortunately they may be justly accused of having shewn with respect to other important phenomena. But it returned once again in 1545–46, appearing in Savoy and over a great part of France; and we possess from Paré[525], and from Sander, a Flemish physician[526], though still a defective, yet a more satisfactory description of its symptoms on this occasion. Its course was, as before, very rapid, so that it destroyed the patient in two or three days; again it attacked the strong rather than the weak, as if in justification of its old name, and those who recovered remained for a long time distinguishable by the loss of their hair and their wretched appearance. Patients felt at the commencement an insufferable weight in the body, with extremely violent headache, which soon deprived them of all consciousness and passed into a profound stupor, even the sphincter muscles losing their power. In other cases a continued state of sleeplessness was followed by feverish delirium, so violent that it was necessary to have recourse to means of restraint. Such opposite states are usual in all typhous fevers. _Sander_ expressly mentions that in most of those affected, eruptions made their appearance. He does not, however, state their nature or describe the course and crisis of the disease otherwise than that it terminated about the fourth or the eleventh day. Even the eruptions that did appear, which were probably petechiæ, and perhaps also (rother friesel) red miliary vesicles, came at an indefinite period; either at the commencement, when they afforded an unfavourable prognosis,