96 INFECTION AND IMMUNITY 



preventive medicine has but recently had its dawn, and 

 sanitarians at the present day often encounter great 

 difficulty in convincing legislators and the public gen- 

 erally of the importance of the measures which have 

 been proved to be adequate, when properly carried 

 out, for the prevention of this and other infectious 

 maladies. 



We have now arrived in our review at the period 

 of the " great plague of London." For some years 

 this city had been almost if not entirely free from the 

 scourge, but in the spring of 1665 it again appeared 

 and within a few months caused a mortality of 68,596 

 in a population estimated at 460,000. This, how- 

 ever, does not fairly represent the percentage of 

 mortality among those exposed, for a large pro- 

 portion of the population fled from the city to 

 escape infection. 



Upon the continent the disease prevailed exten- 

 sively, especially in Austria, Hungary, and Germany. 

 The epidemic in Vienna in 1679 caused a mortality 

 of 76,000. In 1 68 1 the city of Prague lost 83,000 of 

 its inhabitants. During the last quarter of this cen- 

 tury the disease disappeared from some of the prin- 

 cipal countries of Europe. According to Hirsch, it 

 disappeared from England in 1679, from France in 

 1668, from Holland about the same time, from Ger- 

 many in 1683, and from Spain in 1681. In Italy it 



