212 Epidemics. 



that leprosy was gendered in Egypt from the river Nile 

 which flowed through it, and it was never found in any 

 country except Egypt. Though he lived in the time of 

 Pompey's greatness, and died long before his fall, it appears 

 that his studious habits had made him comparatively 

 indifferent to current events, and his early love of Greek 

 literature engrossed his entire attention ; hence his entire 

 ignorance of elephas having appeared in the army of Pompey 

 a few years earlier than the time of his publishing his great 

 poem, which gives his opinion as to the origin of leprosy, 

 quite apart from the recent incidents occurring in the East, 

 and in so doing he assigns to leprosy an entire endemic 

 origin in the land of the Nile. 



We are indebted to Pliny, and not to Lucretius, for our 

 first acquaintance with leprosy as an Italian disease of 

 recent importation. 



The great father of medicine, Hippocrates, never mentions 

 elephantiasis, which is the Greek name for the lepra of 

 Egypt. For anyone who desires to examine the matter 

 carefully will find that the complaint called leprosy by the 

 Greeks was a superficial squamous disease, while elephan- 

 tiasis was that universally malignant disease which first 

 beginning from within worked outwardly; and, after the 

 system was more or less subjected to its power, then began 

 the external manifestations on the skin, in the form of sores 

 and scabs, and white patches and nodules, etc., etc. 



Again, that leprosy during this period was limited to 

 Egypt only is remarkably confirmed by an almost un- 

 suspected historical coincidence, which is worthy of the 

 most careful consideration. 



As Grote has shown, the Greeks borrowed little from 

 others, and gave abundantly from the self-creative genius of 

 their own independent mode of thinking and examining all 

 matters about which they wrote. But whence came they 



