146 The Evolution of Medical Science. 



for a long time failed to see this, and attributed all great 

 epidemics to blasphemy, infidelity, and various forms of 

 religious heresy. Even diseases that were due to the 

 universal unchasteness of the people were charged to blas- 

 phemy, Sabbath-breaking or heresy.* The very existence 

 of such a disease in an epidemic form is proof to us to-day 

 that priests and people, high and low, rich and poor, were, 

 on a grand scale, guilty of immorality of the worst type ; 

 and yet they blamed God for sending the disease as a pun- 

 ishment for their not keeping the Lord's day holy ! To 

 prove their penitence, they built hospitals and churches, 

 dedicating them to Saints, and prayers ascended in public 

 places for relief, while they still went on in their crime 

 and died like rotten sheep. 



The sanitary condition of their homes is scarcely cred- 

 itable. The working-classes, especially, were indescribably 

 and abominably dirty. Here, for instance, is a pen-picture 

 of the 16th and 17th Century homes of England, as given 

 by the Editor of the North British Review many years ago : 

 " In times gone by, and even later than Shakespeare's, our 

 floors were the earth only, as in many cottages now, and 

 we used the broom or brush little, and threw the garbage 

 down, allowing it to lie and rot and become so vile that we 

 invented the device of covering it over with straw so that 

 it might be trodden down, as the cattle make the manure 

 in the straw-yards. The earth of the floor was overweighed 

 with putrid matter, and much of it came into the air of the 

 room ; but the formation of nitre, or saltpetre, began, and 

 oxygen accumulated rapidly, and rendered even these houses 

 habitable in a way."t The author then goes on to tell 

 how, after layer upon layer had been piled feet deep, and 

 even human excreta piled in abundance in the mass, soldiers 

 would be sent to a village on a pleasant day to compel all 

 tlie inhabitants to go into the open air while they cleaned 

 out their pens for them. By lixiviating this mass of filth, 

 they got the saltpetre to make their gunpowder, as pay for 

 their labor, t When a plague came upon these people or 

 their cattle, they drew the sign of the cross on the doors, 

 with tar, as a protection to the inhabitants. 



With the development of chemical knowledge. Carbonic- 

 acid gas, carbon monoxide and sulphuretted hydrogen came 



Westeni I)nip;tcist, Jan. 15, 1890, p. r>. 

 t North nritish lleview, vol. 44, p. 4<i5. 

 t Ibid, p. 447. 



