172 Epidemics. 



from land to land from a given centre, from some unknown 

 agency, giving special activity, or power, to a poison when 

 introduced into the system ; which, in the case of leprosy, 

 creeps over the whole frame, the kidneys excepted, and in 

 time destroys its entire functions and vitality. 



Not like cholera, and especially influenza which, in a 

 single night or a week, will attack a whole house, the side 

 of a street, the wing of a barrack, or an apartment in a ship 

 some die, and some recover to propagate no evil to their 

 offspring, unless cholera here and there predisposes to 

 malignant disease, which, from several singular cases within 

 personal knowledge, it almost appears to have this leaning 

 at times ; moreover, at times, adverse to the line of human 

 intercourse, and at other times in obedience to it, if decaying 

 animal matter is found in the same tract. But leprosy 

 in 60 B.C. only followed the course of human intercourse, 

 and that intercourse of a very definite and precise kind- 

 veterans of a conquering army which laid at the feet of their 

 commander the rich lands of the East. 



Its sudden spread in Italy and its early decline bespeak at 

 once the infectious origin of a disease in a land, at the time 

 of its entrance, ungenial for its continuance as a fixed and 

 local disease ; whilst its appearance in Spain about the 

 same time and from the same source, but abiding there, and 

 also known in many lands (as Celsus informs us, and others 

 later on), indicates that Spain (and North Africa, etc.) 

 afforded for the new visitor the conditions required for a 

 permanent and fruitful habitation. 



Passing over a multitude of subsidiary matter, it may be 

 said of leprosy that it is now very rarely infectious, but in 

 its progress slow, and for the most part endemic ; and in those 

 parts where it is endemic its progress is mostly shown in its 

 hereditary tendencies, but withdrawn from its endemic 

 centres as from Bergen, New Brunswick, etc. and the 



