260 THOMAS CHAPLINj ESQ., M.D., ON 



burning or irritation, like erysipelas, prickly heat, or itch 

 (yp-copa), which is the rendering of the Septuagint. Rashi, the 

 great Jewish commentator, calls it " a disease which makes 

 the body very hot, and produces thirst for water." 



There is nothing to show what kind of fever the mother- 

 in-law of Peter (]\Iatt. viii., 14) or the son of the nobleman at 

 Capernaum (John iv., 52) were afflicted with, except that 

 St. Luke calls the first " a great fever," and the severity of 

 the latter may be inferred from the statement of the fatlier 

 that ]iis son " was at the point of death." In all probability 

 both were suffering from some grave form of continued 

 fever, perhaps typhus or typhoid. There does not seem to 

 be any ground for supposing that the disease was in either 

 case intermittent fever, and that the subsidence of the fever 

 was a natural termination of the paroxysm. The Greek 

 physicians divided fevers into the greater and the lesser, and 

 St. Luke would not have used the term " great fever " for an 

 ordinary ague ; whilst, as to the other case, boys seldom or 

 never die of ague. 



7. jLq^rosi/. — Of all the diseases which afflict humanity, 

 leprosy is one of the most terrible. It infects the whole 

 body, producing hideous distortion of the features, falling of 

 the hair of the eyebrows and face, swellings, ulcerations, 

 contractions of the fingers and toes, which often drop off, 

 leaving only the stumps of the hands or feet, loss of sen- 

 sation, so that the affected parts can be burned without the 

 patient feeling it, diminution of muscular power, hoarseness 

 of voice, the sufferer speaking in a strange, unearthly 

 w^hisper, a repulsive odour, and lingering death, Avhich is 

 usually preceded by a kind of dysentery. Two principal 

 forms of the disease are described ; one in which tubercles 

 form in the skin of the face, ears, arms, and legs, and often 

 in other parts of the body also, and the other attended by 

 peculiar eruptions and ulcerations, with loss of sensation and 

 muscular power. The former is called tubercular, the other 

 ancesthetic leprosy. They do not appear to be essentially 

 distinct diseases, as mixed cases occur partaking of the 

 characters of both. Nothing can be more loathsome than 

 persons in the advanced stages of this frightful malady, and 

 in every age they have been objects of abhorrence, and 

 forced to live apart from their fellow men. There is no 

 reason to doubt that the lepers who sat at the gate of 

 Samaria (2 Kings vii., 3), the kings Uzziah and Azariah, who 

 " dwelt in a several house/' the ten men who were healed by 



