2O2 Epidemics. 



itself so short in its course as the seventh to ninth day r 

 unless something very unusual should occur to cut it short. 



Ergotism is a disease in which this sphacelus can occur 

 as the result of diseased rye eaten as common food. This 

 has occurred several times at Sologne and other parts of 

 France ; and in our own country this disease occurred in the 

 family of John Downing, of Watlesham, so minutely de- 

 scribed by Wollaston. The rapidity with which sphacelus 

 occurred, after first being seized with pain, appears to have 

 been most marked, it happening so early as the fifth and 

 sixth day. But ergotism is neither infectious, nor yet 

 attended with any high fever, and it is entirely endemic. 

 But the plague of Athens was an infectious disease, and had 

 spread from Ethiopia to Greece, and who knows how much 

 further, and was a disease attended with delirium, intense 

 thirst, and very oppressed breathing; hence the bringing into- 

 play as a cause a special diet will in nowise account for 

 this extraordinary phenomenon of mortification of the ex- 

 tremities. 



If it was not in all respects a disease sui generis, we must 

 supply for it a source which had both an infectious nature 

 and also made the extremities and remote parts its special 

 object of attack ; and if we are to say there was at that time 

 a disease which possessed that property in a special manner, 

 that disease must be admitted to be modified and accelerated 

 infection of leprosy poison, blending as a hybrid, with a 

 rubeoloid affection of an infectious character also, and in 

 many respects simulating, in the kind of its eruption, variola. 



The Athenian plague has no counterpart in modern times, 

 and cannot be compared to any one single existing disease. 



That it should now be extinct is no argument against its 

 former existence, if that plague was truly an animal poison 

 of the hybrid character, and of an infectious nature ; for 

 either the breed will go on till one or other lapses into the 



