7 oi 
i88o.] The Sanitary Millennium . 
heaven and earth not dreamt of in our commonly received 
philosophy. But I fear lest such teachings as those ot Ur. 
W may not tend rather to obscure truth and hinder its recog- 
nition. Above all I hold that every friend of humanity 
should wage a war of extermination against asceticism as 
one of the foulest survivals of ignorance and savagery. 
Frank Fernseed. 
V. 
THE SANITARY MILLENNIUM.* 
0 opinion is more common among the educated classes 
than that man’s control over the forces of nature is 
becoming almost complete and that if any ruinous 
catastrophe occurs it is because the authorities or the public 
do not make use of the power and the knowledge they pos- 
sess.! It is hinted that a sunless, dripping summer is due 
in some mysterious manner to the malfeasance of an ad- 
ministration; and it is openly suggested that if cholera, or 
typhoid, or small-pox, or any other epidemic henceforth breaks 
out in a town the municipality or other governing body 
should be subjefted to severe penalties as having negledfed 
their duties. It is, of course, exceedingly satisfactory to 
read an account of the Black Death in the fourteenth cen- 
tvrv, of the Plague of London in 1665, or of Marseille in 
1720; of the visitations of epidemic dysentery, of sweating 
sickness, and the other forms of pestilence which attacked 
the known world every few years from about the 7th . cen- 
tury to the middle of the i8th-and then to be told on 
official authority that we have “ changed all this ; —that 
horrors of such kind are no longer possible. 
For have we not now fifty years ago inaugurated sani- 
tary reform ? ” Have not certain learned men discovered 
for us that the only cause of the so-called zymotic diseases 
. Epidemiology : or the Remote Cause of Epidemic Diseases in the Animal 
and in P the Vegetable Creation. With the Cause of Hurricanes and Abnormal 
Atmospherical Vicissitudes. By John Parkin, M.D. Part II. Second 
Edition. London : David Bogue. 
+ Thus the editor of the Lancet (December 23, 1871) commenting on the 
fad that" in die same year 13,174 persons had died of sma -pox 'n f sevem 
teen chief towns of England, pronounces the faft discreditable to the 
intelligence of the rulers and people of this country. 
