THE PRESENT EVOLUTION OF MAN — PHYSICAL 299 



nine deaths, most of these resulting from the evasion of 

 needful precautions. Later in the epidemic, when it is said 

 to have been like the plague, and the people, seized with 

 fear, had abandoned their sick, only one death occurred 

 among a number of cases treated in separate rooms 

 with fair attention. , . The people chose swampy 

 sites for their dwellings, and whether they kept close 

 shut up in huts without ventilation, or rushed into the 

 streams and remained in the water durino^ the height of 

 the illness, the consequences were equally fatal. The 

 excessive mortality resulted from terror at the mys- 

 terious seizure, and (from) the want of the commonest 

 aids during illness. . . Thousands were carried off by 

 want of nourishment and care, as well as by dysentery 

 and congestion of the lungs. . . We need invoke no 

 special susceptibility of race or peculiarity of constitu- 

 tion to explain the great mortality.' 



" But it is not necessary that we should seek in so 

 distant regions and among uncivilized peoples for proofs 

 of the disastrous influence of unfavourable hygienic con- 

 ditions upon the type of epidemics of measles on a 

 large scale. In the epidemic which prevailed in 1860 

 among the Confederate troops during the American 

 Civil War, there were 1900 deaths out of 38,000 cases 

 of sickness. In the official report it is stated that ' the 

 disease resembled ordinary measles in adults, except 

 when aggravated by the effects of crowd, poisoning, or 

 other depressing influences ' ; in two large hospitals the 

 mortality amounted to 20 per cent, of the sick. In 

 Paris during the siege (January 1871), out of 215 of 

 the Garde Mobile who took measles, 86, or 40 per cent., 

 died ; and the mortality very nearly reached the same 

 figure among the French troops who returned to Paris 

 after the Italian War, 40 out of 125 cases dying in one 

 hosj)ital (whose sanitary condition was bad), with severe 

 intestinal symptoms. Speaking of the disastrous epi- 

 demic of measles in the National Army of Paraguay, 

 Masterman says — 'At the beginning of the Brazilio- 

 Paraguayan War, an epidemic of measles swept off 

 nearly a fifth of the National Army in three months, 

 not from the severity of the disease, for I treated about 



