this extensive period notions and practices, relating to public sanita- 

 tion were being evolved in accordance with the prevalent tenets of 

 causation. In the earliest period religion, superstition, and stellar 

 influence took the principal place in the confused ideas of etiology. 

 Ill-ordered doctrines led to all sorts of irrational practices. Among 

 the Greeks, in the rites of iEsculapius, the sick were not permitted to 

 enter the temples, where they underwent treatment, without first 

 being purified by various baths, frictions, and fumigations. All this 

 was accompanied by ceremonies similar to those practised within the 

 temples, namely, magical performances and fervent prayers recited in 

 a loud voice, often with musical accompaniment. As an accessory to 

 the purification preliminary to being admitted, the patient was 

 required to pass the night stretched on the skin of a sheep that had 

 been offered as a sacrifice. Here he was ordered to compose his mind 

 for sleep and await the arrival of the physician. Throughout these 

 ages as well as in more recent times a fanciful association between 

 the phenomena of the material world and the destinies of mankind 

 closely linked the doctrine of etiology with astrology. The persistent 

 belief of learned men in the relation of stellar conditions to epidemics 

 is in part explained by the fact that astrologers who predicted epi- 

 demics wrought charms against the impending pestilence, thus saving 

 their credit, in event the disaster did not materialize, by claiming that 

 it had been averted through their efforts. These primitive views of 

 the origin of epidemics did not necessarily place the cause of the dis- 

 ease outside the earth and its immediate surroundings. Winds, 

 thunder and lightning, fogs, and other meteors were blamed for caus- 

 ing pestilence, and the flight of birds and insects were supposed to be 

 dependent phenomena. Xanaphanes, five hundred or six hundred 

 years before Christ, expounded an idea that the sun was a torch and 

 the stars candles that were put out from time to time. According to 

 his notion, which was seriously accepted, the stars were not heavenly 

 bodies in the wider sense, but meteors thrown off from the earth. So 

 a belief in stellar influence did not carry the mind outside worldly 

 ranges. For this reason other practices than prayers and sacrifices 

 were believed to be effective. They consisted chiefly in efforts to dis- 

 sipate the meteors, such as huge and numerous fires, and to avoid 

 meteoric influence by confinement in closed or otherwise protected 

 places. 



During the period under consideration, the promptings of supersti- 

 tion were paramount and the epidemiologists of the times confined 

 themselves principally to interpreting the signs of the heavens. More 

 advanced views came as the result of reasoning, but the path of dis- 

 covery by experimental science was not entered upon until after many 

 centuries. 



