For any errors that may have crept into his version, the Translator must crave indulgence. Some such are inevitable, more particularly in the renderings of the innumerable Latin and Greek quotations, many of which are involved in diction and obscure in allusion, and some of disputed interpretation. The labour involved has been no small one,—the mere proof-reading itself being a heavy task in a book like the present crammed with citations from several languages. For the general appearance and get up of the Book, the Publisher, Mr. Charles Carrington, of Paris, is responsible, and his name, so well known in connection with the production of Medical and Scientific works of this kind, is a sufficient guarantee of excellence. In conclusion, the Translator offers with confidence the result of his labours to all Englishmen interested as Specialists in the History of Medicine, in Anthropology and the Scientific Study of Insanity, as also in Classical Scholarship and the Study of Antiquity and Ancient Literature, as well as to Enquirers generally into the History of Morals and the life and life conditions of earlier days. In doing so, he feels sure of a favourable reception for so important and scholarly a Work, throwing such a flood of light on all these different departments of study. OXFORD, June 14, 1901. DR. ROSENBAUM’S PREFACE TO THE FIRST (GERMAN) EDITION AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIRST (GERMAN) EDITION. It is now six years ago, during my residence in Berlin, and with a view to a historical Survey of miliary fevers, that I began a closer and more systematic study of the Epidemics of the XVth. and XVIth. Centuries. In the course of these enquiries my attention was inevitably directed to the subject of Venereal disease, which exerted so powerful an influence at that epoch both on the physical and the moral life of nations. Accustomed as I was to regard History as being something more than a mere quasi-mechanical aggregation of facts, the observation was soon borne in upon me that only through a painstaking examination of the contemporary conditions of epidemic disease could the Venereal Disease of the period be really understood. Consequently I felt I must isolate this terrible scourge of humanity from the general survey,—so general as to be well-nigh all-embracing,—and consider it as a phænomenon apart.