TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.
In reading Dr. Hecker’s account of the Black Death which destroyed so large a portion of the human race in the fourteenth century, I was struck, not only with the peculiarity of the Author’s views, but also with the interesting nature of the facts which he has collected. Some of these have never before been made generally known, while others have passed out of mind, being effaced from our memories by subsequent events of a similar kind, which, though really of less magnitude and importance, have, in the perspective of time, appeared greater, because they have occurred nearer to our own days.
Dreadful as was the pestilence here described, and in few countries more so than in England, our modern historians only slightly allude to its visitation:—Hume deems a single paragraph sufficient to devote to its notice, and Henry and Rapin are equally brief.
It may not then be unacceptable to the medical, or even to the general reader, to receive an authentic and somewhat detailed account of one of the greatest natural calamities that ever afflicted the human race.
My chief motive, however, for translating this small work, and at this particular period, has been a desire that, in the study of the causes which have produced and propagated general pestilences, and of the moral effects by which they have been followed, the most enlarged views should be taken. The contagionist and the anti-contagionist may each find ample support for his belief in particular cases; but in the construction of a theory sufficiently comprehensive to explain throughout the origin and dissemination of universal disease, we shall not only perceive the insufficiency of either doctrine, taken singly, but after admitting the combined influence of both, shall even then find our views too narrow, and be compelled, in our endeavours to explain the facts, to acknowledge the existence of unknown powers, wholly unconnected either with communication by contact or atmospheric contamination.
I by no means wish it to be understood, that I have adopted the author’s views respecting astral and telluric influences, the former of which, at least, I had supposed to have been, with alchemy and magic, long since consigned to oblivion; much less am I prepared to accede to his notion, or rather an ancient notion derived from the East and revived by him, of an organic life in the system of the universe. We are constantly furnished with proofs, that that which affects life is not itself alive; and whether we look to the earth for exhalations, to the air for electrical phenomena, to the heavenly bodies for an influence over our planet, or to all these causes combined, for the formation of some unknown principle noxious to animal existence, still, if we found our reasoning on ascertained facts, we can perceive nothing throughout this vast field for physical research which is not evidently governed by the laws of inert matter, nothing which resembles the regular succession of birth, growth, decay, death, and regeneration, observable in organized beings. To assume, therefore, causes of whose existence we have no proof, in order to account for effects which, after all, they do not explain, is making no real advance in knowledge, and can scarcely be considered otherwise than an indirect method of confessing our ignorance.
Still, however, I regard the author’s opinions, illustrated as they are by a series of interesting facts diligently collected from authentic sources, as, at least, worthy of examination before we reject them, and valuable, as furnishing extensive data on which to build new theories.
I have another, perhaps I may be allowed to say a better, motive for laying before my countrymen this narrative of the sufferings of past ages,—that by comparing them with those of our own time, we may be made the more sensible how lightly the chastening hand of Providence has fallen on the present generation, and how much reason, therefore, we have to feel grateful for the mercy shewn us.