RESEARCH IN MEDICINE 511 



sented a peculiar malignancy ;, and, like small-pox, attacked high and 

 low alike. The causes and origin of these plagues are not difficult to 

 find. Except for the Cloaca Maxima at Eome not a sewer of any con- 

 sequence existed in Europe; drainage was inadequate, the streets were 

 unpaved, and public baths or other facilities for bathing were unknown. 

 Of sanitation no knowledge was at hand. The dead, including the 

 victims of various plagues, were buried hastily — instead of being burned 

 — and usually in shallow ditches, thus allowing presumably an easy 

 pollution of water supplies. As to this, under ordinary circumstances 

 no precautions were taken to keep the water supplies free from fecal 

 and other contaminations. Doubtless, taxes on bread and window 

 panes were responsible in no small part for that diminished resistance 

 which invites infection. Against the spread of plagues the physicians 

 were helpless. The College of Physicians at Paris in the fifteenth cen- 

 tury at the time of the " sweating plague," were, after mature consid- 

 eration, " of the opinion, that the constellations, with the aid of nature, 

 strive, by virtue of their divine might, to protect and heal the human 

 race." This state of mind does not seem so surprising when we recall 

 that Roger Bacon, " the truest philosopher of the Middle Ages," still 

 sought, in the thirteenth century, the philosopher's stone and the elixir 

 of life. " The Eoyal Touch " was still a favorite cure for scrofula 

 ("The Kings of Evil") and various other ills, and indeed persisted 

 into the time of Queen Elizabeth. From " The Anatomy of Melan- 

 choly " (1621) we have it that "there be many mountebanks, quack- 

 salves and empiricks, in every street almost, and in every village." 



Shall we, then, wonder that, in the famine of 1030, human flesh was cooked 

 and sold; or that, in that of 1258, fifteen thousand persons died of hunger in 

 ♦London? Shall we wonder that, in some of the invasions of the plague, the 

 deaths were so frightfully numerous that the living could hardly bury the dead? 

 By that of 1348, which came from the east along the lines of commercial travel 

 and spread all over Europe, one third of the population of France was destroyed. 

 (Draper.) 



Also, the condition of the insane was pitiable; until well into the 

 eighteenth century they were imprisoned, chained and treated as wild 

 beasts. 



Rational therapy did not exist, though it is interesting to note that 

 several important empiric specifics came gradually into general use, as 

 mercury and sulphur introduced in 1510 by Paracelsus, sometimes 

 termed " charlatan and bombast " ; after Harvey's time, Dover's powder 

 (Pulvis Ipecacuanha Comp.) through Captain Dover, physician and 

 buccaneer; and Cinchona (quinine) through the Countess of Cinchon, 

 wife of the Viceroy of Peru, who brought it to the attention (1638) of 

 the Jesuit priests, hence the name, Jesuit's bark. Truly, empirical 

 therapy made progress by curious routes. 



Civil surgery was in a chaotic state, the barber surgeon contended 



