[564] Robert Boyle did not attach much importance to the name of “new disease.” “The term new disease,” he says, “is much abused by the vulgar, who are wont to give that title to almost every fever that, in autumn especially, varies a little in its symptoms or other circumstances from the fever of the foregoing year or season.” (Boyle’s Works. 6 vols. 1772, V. 66.) But it was the name commonly given to the epidemics of catarrhal fever among others, and it does not appear, when the history is examined closely, that it was ever given except to some epidemic separated by several years from the last of the kind.
[565] Sir R. Leveson’s Letters. Hist. MSS. Commiss. V. 146.
[566] Pp. 568-577.
[567] Πυρετολογια sive Gulielmi Dragei Hitchensis Ιατρου καὶ Φιλοσοφου Observationes ab Experientia de Febribus Intermittentibus. Londini, 1665.
[568] His tract is dated 1641.
[569] By Nicholas Sudell, licentiate in physick and student in chimistry. London, 1669.
[570] Πυρετολογια. A rational account of the Cause and Cure of Agues, with their signs, Diagnostick and Prognostick. Also some Specified Medicines prescribed for the Cure of all sorts of Agues, &c. Whereunto is added a short account of the Cause and Cure of Feavers and the Griping in the Guts. Authore Rto. Talbor, Pyretiatro. Londini, 1672.
[571] Sir Thomas Watson (Practice of Physic, I. 725) has a story which shows how long these fancies, encouraged by quacks, may linger: “A coachman by whose side I sat while travelling from Broadstairs to Margate was speaking of the rarity of ague in that part of the Isle of Thanet. His father, he said, once had the complaint, and a fit came on while he was on a visit to him, the coachman, at Ramsgate. The son administered to his suffering parent a glass of brandy; whereupon ‘he threw the agy off his stomach; and it looked for all the world like a lump of jelly.’”
[572] Philip Guide, M.D., A Kind Warning, &c. Lond. 1710.
[573] The best summary of the “history of the use of Peruvian bark” is by Sir George Baker, in Trans. Col. Phys. III. (1785), 173.