16 ADAPTATION AND DISEASE 



of all known writings, namely in the Ebers papyrus, descrip- 

 tions are given of leprosy, and the Ebers papyrus is said to be 

 of the twelfth dynasty, so that leprosy has been known for 

 some four thousand years. 



It is through my old friend, Sir Armand Ruffer, whose recent 

 death we deplore, a man who accomplished much for Egypt, 

 and through his studies in what he described as paleopathology, 

 that we owe the knowledge of prehistoric disease in man. 

 Mummies of yet earlier dynasties — and pre-dynastic — said to 

 date back as far as four thousand years B.C. or six thousand years 

 ago, demonstrate the most respectable antiquity of Bilharziosis, 

 not to mention such everyday disturbances as Rheumatoid 

 Arthritis and Pyorrhoea alveolaris. The characteristic eggs of 

 Bilharzia are still distinguishable in the dried-up tissues of 

 pre-dynastic mummies, so that anaemia and haematuria con- 

 stituted a plague of Egypt before the Pharaohs as they do to-day 

 when the Sultans and their suzerainty have passed away. 1 

 Tuberculosis, too, was there already. He demonstrated the 

 bacilli in tissues in mummies from the Herst collection at Cairo 

 belonging to the twentieth dynasty or so. 



Diseases which are not peculiar to man have indeed been 

 diagnosed in fossil remains. Thus, according to Moodie, 2 caries 

 has been noted in Permian fishes, pyorrhoea in the jaw-bone of 

 an early tertiary three-toed horse, and arthritis and osteomye- 

 litis in the remains of cave bears. 



The Antiquity of the Bacteria 



This, after all, is only what might be expected : these lower 

 forms of life preceded mammals and man, and bacteria must 

 have been among the very early forms of particulate life. So 



1 Just as the earliest known written document is medical, so my late col- 

 league in Anatomy at McGill University, who, while this is passing through the 

 press, from being Director of Recruiting and Brigadier-General has become 

 Minister of National Service and Sir Auckland Geddes, has impressed upon me 

 that the earliest known human fossil is pathological, pointing out that the 

 remarkable thickness of the Piltdown skull, coupled with the characteristic 

 outline of the temporal ridge, can only find their explanation by a diagnosis of 

 Acromegaly, and suggesting that it is thanks to this disease and its results that 

 we owe the survival of these remains through the ages. We do not, however, 

 claim Acromegaly as a result of zymotic disease. 



2 Trans. Chicago Pathological Society, x., 1916, 84. 



