705 
i88o.] The Sanitary Millennium . 
now rapidly regaining its old virulence and re-assuming the 
pestilential proportions which it displa3^ed in the days of our 
forefathers. _ . . , . 
We can now appreciate one portion of Dr. Parkin s theory. 
He holds that there occur certain “ pestilential epochs’* 
during which the world is at frequent intervals devastated 
by epidemics which travel in a determinate direction from 
central or eastern Asia to the west of Europe and even to 
America ; that during such epochs all diseases, even those 
not considered as communicable from one person to another, 
increase in frequency and in violence ; that these epochs are 
further marked by epizootics and by “ blights ” or wide- 
spread diseases in the vegetable world, and are attended by 
a general intensification of earthquakes, storms, floods, 
droughts, fogs, seasons of abnormal heat or cold, and other 
convulsions of inorganic nature. Such an epoch is generally 
ushered in by the appearance of new diseases or of thereap- 
appearance of maladies that had become obsolete. Dr. Parkin 
holds that tbe last great pestilential term began about the 
7th century. The advent of plague was accompanied by 
measles, small-pox, and malignant sore throat. From that 
time to the beginning of the 18th century Europe find 
western Asia were almost incessantly ravaged by epidemics, 
among which the plague, or Black Death, was most promi- 
nent and most formidable. During all these hundreds of 
years there was no such freedom from pestilence as western 
Europe has enjoyed between 175 ° an( ^ Bie advent of the 
cholera in 1830.* 
This non-pestilental period presents some most remarkable 
features. The year 1759 saw the close of a violent epizdotic, 
and from that time till quite a recent date England has been 
free from any generally prevailing disease among cattle. 
About 1692 the yearly deaths from dysentery in London had 
exceeded 2000. In 1799 they on ty amounted to 13 '• Be- 
tween 1728-38 the burials of children under two years of 
age averaged in London 10,000 yearly. Between 1790-1800 
they had fallen to 6000. 
The author further declares that after the great earth- 
quake of Lisbon in 1755 terrestrial concussions declined in 
Europe and Asia both as regards numbers and violence. 
The season of 1766-7 was the last of those visitations of 
* Nevertheless we must not forget the outbreak of yellow fever at Malaga 
in 1803, which carried off 36,000 persons and was accompanied, according to 
Waterton, who was then a resident in that city, by seven shocks of earth- 
quake. 
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