CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE 



tion enjoyed a very different status. At that time, itch, 

 instead of being a most plebeian malady, was, so to say, a 

 court disease. It enjoyed a circulation, in high circles 

 and in low, that modern therapeutics has quite denied 

 it ; and the physicians of the time gave it a fictitious 

 added importance by ascribing to its influence the ex- 

 istence of almost any obscure malady that came under 

 their observation. Long after Napoleon's time, gale 

 continued to hold this proud distinction. For example, 

 the imaginative Dr. Hahnemann did not hesitate to af- 

 firm, as a positive maxim, that three-fourths of all the 

 ills that flesh is heir to were in reality nothing but va- 

 rious forms of " gale repercutee." 



All of which goes to show how easy it may be for a 

 masked pretender to impose on credulous humanity ; for 

 nothing is more clearly established in modern knowl- 

 edge than the fact that " gale repercutee " was simply a 

 name to hide a profound ignorance ; no such disease ex- 

 ists, or ever did exist. Gale itself is a sufficiently tangi- 

 ble reality, to be sure ; but it is a purely local disease of 

 the skin, due to a perfectly definite cause, and the dire 

 internal conditions formerly ascribed to it have really no 

 causal connection with it whatever. This definite cause, 

 as every one nowadays knows, is nothing more or less 

 than a microscopic insect which has found lodgment on 

 the skin, and has burrowed and made itself at home 

 there. Kill that insect, and the disease is no more 

 hence it has come to be an axiom with the modern 

 physician that the itch is one of the three or four dis- 

 eases that he positively is able to cure, and that very 

 speedily. But it was far otherwise with the physicians 

 of the first third of our century, because to them the 

 cause of the disease was an absolute mystery. 



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