HISTOKICAL EACES 245 



ditions have remained favourable. They may perhaps have been 

 most favourable in European towns in mediaeval and later times. 

 According to Eogers, ' the habits of the people were favourable 

 to pestilence. Every writer during the fifteenth and sixteenth 

 centuries who makes his comment on the customs and practices 

 of English life, adverts to the profuseness of their diet and the 

 extraordinarily uncleanliness of their habits and persons. The 

 floor of an ordinary Englishman's house, as Erasmus describes it, 

 was inconceivably filthy, in London filthier than elsewhere, for 

 centuries after these events. The streets and open ditches of the 

 towns were polluted and noisome beyond measure. The English- 

 man disdained all the conditions of health.' l 



Turning to the evidence, we find that facts are very scanty for 

 the earliest times of this period. Such evidence as we have points 

 to the prevalence of disease during the early civilizations. We 

 know that pestilence swept over Egypt the references to the 

 subject in the Bible being familiar. But precisely what diseases 

 were prevalent are not known ; the descriptions of the symptoms 

 are seldom sufficiently accurate even in mediaeval times to make 

 it possible to identify the diseases. 2 From other evidence it 

 appears that in any case tuberculosis, leprosy, plague, and bil- 

 harzia were common in Egypt. There is much evidence to show 

 that most diseases only reached Europe in relatively late times. 

 Plague, for instance, probably first reached Europe in A.D. 542. 

 It is possible, however, that the pestilence which ravaged most 

 of Europe between A. D. 164 and 188 was plague. 3 Generally 

 speaking, the evidence points to the conclusion that many diseases 

 came from the East, where they in all probability originated. 

 Plague, cholera, and sma]l-pox all seem to have had their origin 

 in India. This conclusion is in harmony with what we know of 

 the origin of civilization, for it is where men first came to dwell 

 in close proximity that we should expect to find that disease 

 originated. 



With regard to mortality from disease very little accurate 

 information is available until modern times. It is quite impossible 

 to say, for instance, whether disease was the cause of a higher 



1 Rogers, Six Centuries, vol. i, p. 336. 2 On this subject see Hirsch, Hand- 



book of Geographical and Historical Pathology ; Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle 

 Ages ; Clemow, Geography of Disease. 3 The famous ' plague ' of Athens, 



430 to 428 B.C., was not plague in the technical sense; it was probably typhoid or 

 small-pox. 



