NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINE 



flesh is heir to were in reality nothing but various 

 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 

 knowledge than the fact that "gale repercutee" was 

 simply a name to hide a profound ignorance ; no such 

 disease exists or ever did exist. Gale itself is a suffi- 

 ciently tangible 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 as- 

 cribed 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 in- 

 sect which has found lodgment on the skin, and has 

 burrowed and made itself at home there. Kill that in- 

 sect 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 diseases 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. 



It is true that here and there a physician had claimed 

 to find an insect lodged in the skin of a sufferer from 

 itch, and two or three times the claim had been made 

 that this was the cause of the malady, but such views 

 were quite ignored by the general profession, and in 

 1833 it was stated in an authoritative medical treatise 

 that the "cause of gale is absolutely unknown." But 

 even at this time, as it curiously happened, there were 

 certain ignorant laymen who had attained to a bit of 



205 



