[872] The term “autonomy” in the foregoing is used according to the exposition which I originally gave of it in an address to the British Medical Association (1883) on “The Autonomous Life of the Specific Infections” (Brit. Med. Journ., Aug. 4, 1883). The semi-independence of constitutional states has been dealt with in my book, Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease. London, 1885.
[873] The South-African controversy, which became acute, was carried on in journals of the colony (the South African Medical Journal about 1883 and 1884 is a likely source of information), but some echoes of it were heard in letters to the British Medical Journal, 1884. A few years ago a similar diagnostic difficulty arose, not in an African race, but among the inmates of a Paris hospital. In the smallpox wards of the Hôpital St Antoine, a number of cases occurred, one of them in a nurse, another in an assistant physician, of a particular skin-disease, which was either discrete or confluent, lasted about ten days, and was attended by fever up to 40° C. or 41° C. Yet these cases were discriminated from smallpox; they were diagnosed, and have been recorded, as an epidemic of ecthyma. (Du Castel, Gazette des Hôpitaux, 1881, No. 122, quoted in the Jahresbericht.)
[874] Krankheiten des Orients. Erlangen, 1847, p. 127.
[875] History of Physic, II. 190.
[876] Gruner, a learned professor of Jena, who made collections of works or passages relating to syphilis and to the English sweat, published also in 1790 a collection of medieval chapters or sentences on smallpox, “De Variolis et Morbillis fragmenta medicorum Arabistarum,” including the whole of Gaddesden’s chapter but omitting the earlier and more important chapter from Gilbert. Gruner correctly says at the end of his extracts: “while the Arabists write thus, they seem to have followed their Arabic guides, and to have repeated what they received from the latter.” This is obvious from the text of the chapters themselves: some quote more often than others from Avicenna, Rhazes and Isaac; but it is clear that they all base upon the Arabians. The substance is the same in them all; it is a merely verbal handling of Arabic observation and theory. There are no concrete experiences or original additions, from which one might infer that they were familiar at first hand with smallpox and measles. Häser, however, seems to take these chapters in the medieval compends as evidence of the general prevalence of smallpox in Europe in the Middle Ages. As he finds little writing about smallpox when modern medical literature began, he is driven into the paradox that epidemics of smallpox had actually become rarer again in the sixteenth century (III. p. 69). But the sixteenth-century references to smallpox, although they are indeed scanty, are at the same time the earliest authentic accounts of it in Western Europe.
[877] This intention is most clearly expressed by Valescus de Tharanta: “Then let him be wrapped in a woollen cloth of Persian, or at least of red, so that by the sight of the red cloth the blood may be led to the exterior and so be kept at no excessive heat, according to the tenour of the sixth canon [of Avicenna].” Apud Gruner, p. 46.
[878] History of Physic, Pt. II. p. 280.
[879] Rosa Anglica. Papiae, 1492.
[880] Chronica Majora. Rolls ed. V. 452.
[881] Rolls of Parliament.