SCIENCE 



[N. 8. Vol. XL. No. 1018 



eases is often due to the rapidity with which 

 the invading organism is broken up by the 

 secretions of the body cells and the protein 

 poison made effective. From this I have 

 concluded that contagion, like war, destroys 

 the very flower of the race. This view is 

 sustained by the historians of the pesti- 

 lences of former times. 



Thucydides in his description of the 

 plague at Athens says: 



Moreover, no constitution, whether in respect of 

 strength or weakness, was found able to cope with 

 it; nay, it swept away all alike, even those at- 

 tended to with the most careful management. 



Procopius in his account of the Justinian 

 epidemic states that youth was the most 

 perilous season, and females were less sus- 

 ceptible than males. 



Cogan, in describing the outbreak of 

 typhus at Oxford in 1577, writes: 



The same kind of ague raged in a manner over 

 all England, and took away very many of the 

 strongest sort, and in their lustiest age, and for 

 the most part, men and not women and children, 

 culling them out here and here, even as you would 

 choose the best sheep out of a flock. 



In his account of the plague of 1665 in 

 London, Boghurst makes the following 

 statement : 



Of all the common hackney prostitutes of Luten- 

 ers-lane, dog-yard, cross-lane, Baldwins-gardens, 

 Hatton-gardens and other places, the common 

 criers of oranges, oysters, fruits, etc., all the im- 

 pudent drunken, drubbing bayles and fellows and 

 many others of the rouge route, there is but few 

 missing — verifying the testimony of Diemerbroech 

 that the plague left the rotten bodies and took the 

 sound. 



Like testimony comes from an account 

 of the plague at Moscow: 



Drunkards and persons of feeble temperament 

 were less subject to attack. 



Davidson observed that typhus fever was 

 more frequent among the robust than the 

 Weak. He states that out of 429 cases the 

 spare and unhealthy taken together made 



only about 17 per cent. He adds that the 

 death-rate among the poor was one in 

 twenty-three, while among the well-to-do 

 it was one in four. The greater mortality 

 of typhus among the higher classes has been 

 noted by Barber and Cheyne and by 

 Braken. 



Hurty, nearly a century ago, wrote: 



A fever which consigns thousands to the grave, 

 consigns tens of thousands to a worse fate — ^to 

 hopeless poverty, for fever spares the children and 

 cuts off the parents, leaving the wretched offspring 

 to fill the future ranks of prostitution, mendicancy 

 and crime. 



Creighton says: 



The best illustrations of the greater severity 

 and fatality of typhus among the well-to-do come 

 from Ireland in times of famine, and will be found 

 in another chapter. But it may be said here, so 

 that this point in the natural history of typhus 

 may not be suspected of exaggeration, that the 

 enormously greater fatality of typhus (of course, 

 in a smaller number of cases) among the richer 

 classes of the Irish families, who had exposed 

 themselves in the work of administration, of jus- 

 tice, or of charity, rests on the unimpeachable au- 

 thority of such men as Graves, and on the concur- 

 rent evidence of many. 



A surgeon in the British navy at the time 

 of William III and Anne tells how he was 

 led to practise bleeding in fever as follows : 



I had observed on a ship of war, whose comple- 

 ment was near 500, in a Mediterranean voyage in the 

 year 1694, when we lost about 90 or 100 men, mostly 

 by fever, that those who died were commonly the 

 young, but almost always the strongest, lustiest, 

 handsomest persons, and that two or three escaped 

 by such natural hemorrhages, which were five or 

 six pounds of blood. 



The middle ages were indeed dark phys- 

 ically, intellectually and morally. Here 

 and there, now and then, some man of 

 genius towered above the general low level 

 of his contemporaries and not infrequently 

 he paid dearly for his audacity. For some 

 centuries the Arab, especially in Spain, 

 stood out alone as the torch-bearer of sci- 

 ence, and he, when driven back into the 



