and confess our total inability to fathom the unbounded.
If then no practical advantage can accrue from investigating the writings of the ancients on these subjects, beyond comparing their historical statements with those of more recent date, our purpose will be served by occasionally embodying any remarkable observations of the former with those of the latter.
In proceeding with this course it were better to confine our minds chiefly to two diseases which appear from history to have been known from the earliest periods, these are the Plague and the Small Pox, mentioning other diseases only en route.
Passing then, to the sixth century of the Christian era for the first distinct and connected account of the Plague, it appears from a host of testimony, that the history of this disease, as given by Procopius, well merits our attention. Drs. Friend and Hamilton, in their Histories of Medicine, and Gibbon, in his History of Rome, are equally warm in their praise of Procopius: the latter says, he "emulated the skill and diligence of Thucydides in the
description of the Plague at Athens." The account given by Procopius of this disease, does not differ materially from that given by subsequent eye-witnesses of similar pestilences. Its point of origin is clearly marked, and its mode of dispersion in all directions distinctly traced from "the neighbourhood of Pelusium, between the Serbonian bog and the eastern channel of the Nile." It commenced in the year 542. It raged in Constantinople in the following year, and it was in this city that our historian gathered the materials which are handed down to us. When, however, we anxiously look for any explanation as to the cause of the malady, we are told that it must have been a direct visitation from Heaven, in consequence of the eccentric characters exhibited in its wide-spreading influence, in not yielding to the scrutiny nor bending to the laws known to prevail, and to regulate the course of other diseases: neither country nor clime, age nor sex, the strong and healthy, nor the weakly and previously diseased, could be said to be free from its indiscriminate destruction.
But some phenomena preceding the outbreak of the pestilence are observed as coincidences by all authors. Gibbon thus writes: "I shall conclude this chapter with the comets, the earthquakes, and the plague which astonished or afflicted the age of Justinian." From the accounts given by this author, earthquakes for some years had been threatening and destroying many portions of the globe,
that in the ruins of cities and in the chasms of the earth, great was the sacrifice of human life. Constantinople, which suffered so severely from the plague is said to have been shaken for forty days. These great disturbances of the globe have been always looked upon as indicating other and important influences of a secret or hidden nature; these impressions on the minds of the people are traceable throughout the histories of all epidemics, and have been sufficiently distinct among the people of our own time, preceding and during the period of infliction.
From this short notice of the Plague of 543, I pass to the ninth century, when Rhazes, the Arabian physician, endeavoured to enlighten the world on the subject of Small Pox.[[19]] In quoting his opinions, I am not to be understood as subscribing to them, but merely endeavouring to point out some peculiar and interesting observations.
First, then, Rhazes attributes the disease to a condition of the blood, which he thus describes, to shew how it happens that in infancy and childhood the disease is most prevalent, and that old age is
least liable to the affection.[[20]] "The blood of infants and children may be compared to must, in which the coction leading to perfect ripeness has not yet begun, nor the movement towards fermentation taken place; the blood of young men may be compared to must which has already fermented and made a hissing noise, and has thrown out abundant vapours and its superfluous parts, like wine which is now still and quiet, and arrived at its full strength, and as to the blood of old men, it may be compared to wine which has now lost its strength, and is beginning to grow vapid and sour."