800 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ment. However uncertain we may be as to the precise nature of 

 the Mosaic disease, it appears to me to be almost certain that the 

 leprosy cured by our Saviour, after his sermon on the mount, was not 

 the leprosy of the present day, but a far more common disease which 

 is now known as psoriasis. The earliest Greek writers on medicine 

 were unacquainted with Egyptian leprosy, except by hearsay. Hip- 

 pocrates, writing over four hundred years before Christ, speaks of it 

 as " the Phoenician disease," and even at the time of the Septuagint 

 translation of the Pentateuch this leprosy was practically unknown 

 to the Greeks. The Hebrew word tsaraath was translated by the 

 Greek word lepra, which was the name of a disease characterized by 

 white scaly patches upon the skin. This differed totally in its nature 

 from the disease which is now called leprosy, and which prevailed at 

 that time in Egypt and Palestine. This disease, being subsequently 

 introduced into Greece, was designated by a different name, elephan- 

 tiasis. At the time when the Gospels were written, the Greek medi- 

 cal writers recognized two distinct diseases under these names, lepra 

 and elephantiasis. The former was the psoriasis, or white, scaly dis- 

 ease of the present day; the latter was the modern leprosy. The 

 description of each of these diseases by Greek writers is explicit and 

 readily recognizable, and the Gospels of Matthew and Mark agree in 

 the statement that it was lepra and not elephantiasis which was cured 

 by our Saviour. In other words, it was psoriasis, and not the modern 

 leprosy. 



-- 



THE EEMEDIES OF NATUKE. 



By FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D. 

 MISCELLANEOUS EEMEDIES. 



ANAESTHETICS. The inductive study of Nature has often 

 proved the shortest way to discoveries which other methods can 

 reach only by a circuitous route. The ancient Greeks, recognizing the 

 significance of the fact that malarial complaints vanish at the approach 

 of winter, cured their fever-patients by refrigeration, and this century 

 of research will perhaps close before some experimenting Pasteur 

 stumbles upon the fact that the proximate cause of ague and yellow 

 fever can be traced to the agency of microscopic parasites whose de- 

 velopment may be arrested by the influence of a low temperature. More 

 than two thousand years ago the movement-cure, the fasting-cure, and 

 other reactions against the baneful tendencies of the drug-delusion, 

 were anticipated by the school of the natural philosopher Asclepiades. 

 The principle of the best natural anaesthetic, too, was practically 

 applied, if not theoretically understood, by our rude ancestors. No one 

 who has watched the contest of a pair of rough-and-tumble fighters 



