600 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 



XIII. FROM FETICH TO HYGIENE. 



By ANDREW DICKSON WIIITE, LL. D., L.H.D., 



EX-PRESIDENT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 

 II. 



WE have now seen how powerful in various nations espe- 

 cially obedient to theology were the forces working in 

 opposition to the evolution of hygiene. We shall find this same 

 opposition, less effective, it is true, but still acting with great 

 power in countries which had become somewhat emancipated 

 from theological control. In England, during the mediaeval 

 period, persecutions of Jews were occasionally resorted to, and 

 here and there we hear of dealings with witches; but, as tor- 

 ture was rarely used in England, there were few of those tor- 

 ture-born confessions of persons charged with producing plague 

 which in other countries gave rise to wide-spread cruelties. 

 Down to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the filthiness 

 in the ordinary mode of life in England was such as we can 

 now hardly conceive : fermenting organic material was allowed 

 to accumulate and become a part of the earthen floors of rural 

 dwellings; and this undoubtedly developed the germs of many 

 diseases. In his noted letter to the physician of Cardinal Wol- 

 sey, Erasmus describes the filth thus incorporated into the floors 

 of English houses, and, what is of far more importance, he had 

 an inkling of the true cause of the wasting diseases of the period. 

 He says, "If I entered into a chamber which had been unin- 

 habited for months, I was immediately seized with a fever." 

 He ascribed the fearful plague of the sweating sickness to this 

 cause. So, too, the noted Dr. Caius advised sanitary precautions 

 against the plague ; and in after-generations, Mead, Pringle, and 

 others urged them ; but the prevailing thought was too strong, 

 and little was done. Even the floor of the presence-chamber of 

 Queen Elizabeth in Greenwich Palace was " covered with hay, 

 after the English fashion," as one of the chroniclers tells us. 

 In the seventeenth century, aid in these great scourges was 

 mainly sought in special church services ; the foremost English 

 churchmen during that century being greatly given to study of 

 the early fathers of the Church, the theological theory of dis- 

 ease, so dear to the fathers, still held sway, and this was the case 

 when the various visitations reached their climax in the great 

 plague of London in 1065, which swept off more than a hundred 

 thousand people from that city. The attempts at meeting it by 

 sanitary measures were few and poor ; the medical system of the 



