Still are left amongst us the bases of all
the diseases that, up to the present hour, have afflicted humanity.
The existing calendar of diseases, studied in connection with the
classical history of the diseases written for us by the longest
unbroken line of authorities in the world of letters, shows, in
unmistakable language, that the imposition of every known malady of
man is coeval with every phase of his recorded life on the planet. No
malady, once originated, has ever actually died out; many remain as
potent as ever. That wasting fatal scourge, pulmonary consumption, is
the same in character as when Coelius Aurelianus gave it description.
The cancer of to-day is the cancer known to Paulus Eginaeta. The Black
Death, though its name is gone, lingers in malignant typhus. The great
plague of Athens is the modern great plague of England, scarlet fever.
The dancing mania of the Middle Ages and the convulsionary epidemic
of Montmartre, subdued in their violence, are still to be seen in
some American communities, and even at this hour in the New Forest
of England. Small-pox, when the blessed protection of vaccination is
withdrawn, is the same virulent destroyer as it was when the Arabian
Rhazes defined it. Ague lurks yet in our own island, and, albeit the
physician is not enriched by it, is in no symptom changed from the
ague that Celsus knew so well.
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