Japanese textbook on plague, with, Pathogenic horticulture : in two parts.

Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Japanese textbook on plague, with, Pathogenic horticulture : in two parts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    The second time was in the fourteenth century. Opinions differ as to the original starting point of the disease, some attributing it to China, and some considering it to have originated in the neighborhood of the River Ganges. It is difficult to ascertain its exact origin. Still, it is quite evident that the disease was imported from the East. It reached Turkey overland from Western Asia, travelling by way of Asia Minor through the traffic and intercourse between those countries. It came to Italy by sea from the North African coast. Thence the epidemic spread all over Europe, even Greenland in the far north not escaping. It is said that its virulence at this period was so great that the people attributed it to the influence of evil stars, or reckoned it as a direct punishment from God ; all awaited their end with clasped hands ; and corpses were to be seen scattered about every- where. According to Hecker, the victims who succumbed to the scourge were considerably over twenty-five millions or almost one quarter of the entire population of Europe. The name Black Death was given to the disease at this time. It was during the period of 1346-13S3 that the epidemic made the greatest ravages, the neighborhood of the Danube in Austria. Upper Italy, England, East Germany, Holland, and Russia being devastated most terribly. It raged and continued into the fifteenth century, .but we do not see a trace of its cessation. Its force, however, appeared to be spent in the sixteenth century, though by no means was it extinct. The last half of the seventeenth century (1650) saw the entire disappearance of the epidemic in England. In Sweden and Denmark (1657), West Germany (1667), North France and Switzerland (1668), and East Germany, it gradually became extinct. Since then until now, Europe has been spared entirely a revisitation of this dreadful scourge ; on which account Euro- pean doctors, considering the disease a medieval one, had almost entirely omitted it from their medical works, giving only a mere outline of its terrible nature in the history of medicine, just sufficient to exercise our historical imagina- tion. Although the disease ceased to prevail in Europe, yet the eighteenth century saw a small outbreak in Asia Minor and Asiatic Turkey which spread into Russia and part of Prussia, and from Prague into part of Austria. But the epidemic was of a slight nature. In the nineteenth century, about 1878-1879, there occurred small outbreaks at Odessa