62 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The United States is confessedly one of the most powerful of 

 nations and governments, but its entire military force can not 

 crush the illicit traffic in refined opium, under a temptation of the 

 realization of six dollars contingent on every pound of this com- 

 modity that is successfully smuggled into the country. 



THE BUBONIC PLAGUE. 



BY VICTOR C. VATJGHAN, 



PROFESSOB OF HYGIENE IN THE UNIVKB9ITY OF MICHIGAN. 



rjlHOSE twin monsters of human misery, Famine and Disease, 

 J- are now holding high carnival in India. Death follows in 

 their wake and gathers in a rich harvest. Appeals to the chari- 

 table of the world are being made, and the civilized nations of 

 Europe and America are looking apprehensively toward the East. 

 The great plague, which has confined its ravages for the most 

 part to certain limited districts of Asia for the past two hundred 

 years, seems to have grown strong enough to threaten to take a 

 journey abroad. The black death has unfurled its banner in 

 the face of modern civilization. For a period of more than a 

 thousand years this disease once held dominion over Europe. 

 The story of the horrors of the fourteenth and seventeenth cen- 

 turies has seemed a history of a past so remote that it has been 

 nearly forgotten save by those especially interested in the prog- 

 ress of medicine. Is history to repeat itself in this form of 

 human suffering ? What is the bubonic plague ? Do we know 

 anything of its specific cause, of its methods of invasion, of 

 the means necessary to combat it ? These are questions which 

 I have thought might at this time be of more than passing 

 interest. 



Oribasius was physician and friend of Julian the Apostate, 

 and lived in the fourth century of our era. He wrote a medical 

 encyclopaedia, composed principally of extracts from older med- 

 ical authors. This encyclopsedia remained unknown in the Vati- 

 can Library until the early part of the present century, when it 

 was discovered by that indefatigable student of old manuscripts, 

 Cardinal Mai. In the forty-fourth book of this collection there 

 is a note from Rufus, who states that the physicians of the time 

 of Dionysius were acquainted with a disease which is described 

 as " Pestilentes bubones maxime letales et acuti, qui maxime circum 

 Libyam et Egyptum et Syriam dbservantur" There follows a 

 description of this disease sufficiently accurate to leave no doubt 

 that it was identical with the bubonic plague. Now, this Dio- 

 nysius lived about three hundred years before Christ. There is 



