Remote they languish’d and full frequent died;
But chief the dog his generous strength resign’d,
Tainting the highways, while the ruthless bane
Through every limb his sickening spirit drove.”
The poet Ovid, in the seventh book of his Metamorphoses, in describing the terrible pestilence which occurred in the island of Egina (see ‘History of Pestilences’), represents the pestilence as arising from the following causes:—He exhibits the earth covered with dense clouds, darkness, and suffocating heat; the deadly south winds blowing for four months, the very vapours of disease; the lakes and fountains infected, the air poisoned, and the entire land infested with venomous serpents, as happened to the people of old. The plague or pestilence first attacked horses, oxen, mules, sheep, dogs, cats, and even birds, and then it affected mankind; death was sudden, and the streets were choked with the carcases of men and beasts, and universal nature seemed to be suffering from premature caducity.
In order to show the identity of this pestilence with the plague of Egypt, the bilious remittent or yellow pestilence of the West Indies and the United States, the disease termed Andalusian fever which has from the earliest ages made such havoc in Spain and the adjoining country, and also with the pestilence which has more than once visited both England and Ireland in days of yore, we have collected the symptoms of that disease from Ovid’s poetical enumeration of the morbid phenomena, which were,—great heat in the bowels, flushings of the face, difficulty of breathing, bilious vomiting, pains in the head, with obstinate constipation, great prostration of strength, unquenchable thirst, delirium, often attended with coma, great anguish, dry black tongue, cough, &c., which proceeded to a fatal termination in the course of two, three, or four days: the following is a translation or imitation of the original.
“A dreadful plague from angry Juno came,
To scourge the land that bore her rival’s name,
Before her fatal anger was reveal’d,
And teeming malice lay as yet conceal’d.