116 THE PLAGUE 



work, if haply any man survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pesti- 

 lence and continue the work I have commenced. 



It is estimated that during the dark ages the average of human 

 life was less than twenty years. A high birth-rate was necessary to 

 keep the race alive, but notwithstanding this, Europe was sparsely 

 inhabited. At the time of the Norman conquest the inhabitants of 

 England numbered between two and two and one-half million, prob- 

 ably nearer the former, for they had not reached the greater number 

 a hundred years later. Creighton says : "It would be within the mark 

 to say that less than one-tenth of the population was urban in any 

 distinctive sense of the term. After London, Norwich, York and 

 Lincoln, there were probably no towns with five thousand inhabitants." 

 Indeed, urban life, as we now know it, was quite impossible in this 

 age of pestilence and would soon become so again were the functions 

 of preventive medicine relaxed. 



Most of the great epidemics of the middle ages were designated 

 as pestilentia or magna mortalitas. In the most deadly visitations the 

 bubonic plague is so accurately described that there can be no doubt 

 about its identity, but it must not be supposed that the people enjoyed 

 any high degree of health even in those periods when this contagion 

 languished on account of exhaustion of susceptible victims. Ergotism, 

 under the name of Saint Anthony's fire, was endemic in France and 

 adjacent territories; Normandy was filled with lepers, but Christ's 

 poor were not confined to that country. England was regarded as the 

 special home of hunger, but abundance was a stranger to the masses 

 in every land. The mysterious sweating sickness, apparently brought 

 to England with Henry Tudor in 1485, developed in five distinct epi- 

 demics which were characterized by the fact that the mortality was 

 greater among the rich than the poor. Typhus, known as morbus 

 pauperum, prevailed largely in the jails, on ships and among the 

 squalid inhabitants of the cities. Even the discovery of America car- 

 ried to Europe the scourge of syphilis, which was spread over Italy 

 by the soldiers of Charles VIII, and within a few years reached the 

 most distant parts of Europe. Smallpox appeared in England in the 

 sixteenth century, having journeyed, according to the most reliable 

 authority, all the way from the Orient. That tuberculosis, diphtheria, 

 dysentery and other diseases, still with us, prevailed during the middle 



