(4) The soundness and efficiency or otherwise of the preventive and curative measures with which the combined intelligence of the Medical Faculty has risen to the dire emergency of the moment for the protection of the people who have relied so confidently, as by law compelled, upon the standard of their acumen and official aid as competent guardians of public safety. The findings, as to the first question, are to the effect that it appears, from the earliest recorded annals of disease, that epidemics corresponding to the present outbreak have occurred at irregular periods all up the centuries under names and conditions peculiar to the times, and following usually in the wake of some great social cataclysm, strain or upheaval, the result of wars, persecutions, famines and distress--causes which clearly illustrate the close reactive connection between the mental and physical action of disease. The great pandemics seem to have originated largely in the Orient--the region of vast congested populations and racial struggles and starvation--the advent of their apparent influence upon the western world depending chiefly upon the rate of commercial or popular intercourse, the movements of armies or the ingress or egress of peoples. The logical establishment of direct proof of the connection between these visitations and local epidemics in distant lands is a problem as yet unsolved. The weight of evidence, at first sight, would seem to lie rather in the other direction--to indicate that such epidemics are the direct outcome of existing local conditions, mental and physical. For example: At the end of that strenuous period in England's history, between the reign of the first Charles and the fall of the Commonwealth, an epidemic broke out which, as the historian tells us, converted the country into "one vast hospital." The malady--which by the way was fatal to Cromwell--the Lord Protector himself--was then termed "the ague." The term "Influenza" was first given to the epidemic of 1743 in accordance with the Italianizing fashion of the day, but was eventually superseded by the French expression "La Grippe," usually held to represent a more modified form of the disease which appears to vary in intensity and virulence according lo its provocation and derivation.