Skin diseases and their remedies / by Robert J. Jordan.

  • Jordan, Henry J.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Skin diseases and their remedies / by Robert J. Jordan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    29/304 (page 13)
    day, had become familiar to physicians in the second century of the Christian era. It may be surmised that these skin affections spread over occidental Europe, wherever the Roman legions passed; hut it is probable that the fre- quency of occurrence and intensity which characterised the diseases when they first mani- fested themselves, whether as novel disorders or as an epidemic outbreak of sporadic, although rare diseases, quickly became mitigated. The intensity and frequency soon declined; but the form impressed upon the affections during this epidemic outbreak became, so to speak, abiding. In fact, so far as we can gather from history, there would appear to have been, during the two first centuries of our era, a true epidemic of certain severe forms of chronic skin diseases in Italy, and probably elsewhere in Europe. Moreover, at the commencement of this epide- mic, we find observers (as at the beginning of the epidemics of our own days) assigning its origin to two different sources; the one, to im- portation into the country from without by con- tagion ; the other, to development from within. II. We pass now to the midst of the 12th