The epidemics of the middle ages / From the German of J.F.C. Hecker ; translated by B.G. Babington.

  • Hecker, J. F. C. (Justus Friedrich Carl), 1795-1850.
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The epidemics of the middle ages / From the German of J.F.C. Hecker ; translated by B.G. Babington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    powerful to induce thern to leave us circumstantial and scien- tific accounts of contemporary epidemics, which, nevertheless, have, even in historical times, afflicted, in almost numberless visitations, the whole human race. Still less did it occur to them to take a more exalted stand, whence they could compre- hend at one view, these stupendous phenomena of organic collective life, wherein the whole spirit of humanity powerfully and wonderfully moves, and thus regard them as one whole, in which higher laws of nature, uniting together the utmost diver- sity of individual parts, might be anticipated or perceived. Here a wide, and almost unfathomable chasm occurs in the science of medicine, which, in this age of mature judgment and multifarious learning, cannot, as formerly,be overlooked. His- tory alone can fill it up; she alone can give to the doctrine of diseases that importance without which its application is limited to occurrences of the moment; whereas the development of the phenomena of life, during extensive periods, is no less a problem of research for the philosopher, who makes the boundless science of nature his study, than the revolutions of the planet on which we move. In this region of inquiry the very stones have a language, and the inscriptions are yet legible which, before the creation of man, were engraved by organic life, in wondrous forms on eternal tablets. Exalted ideas of the monuments of primaeval antiquity are here excited, and the forms of the ante- mundane ways and creations of nature are conjured up from the inmost bosom of the earth, in order to throw their bright beam- ing light upon the surface of the present. Medicine extends not so far. The remains of animals make us indeed acquainted, even now, with diseases to which the brute creation was subject long ere the waters overflowed, and the mountains sunk; but the investigation which is our more immediate object, scarcely reaches to the beginning of human culture. Records of remote and of proximate eras, lie before us in rich abundance. They speak of the deviations and destructions of human life, of exterminated and newly- formed nations; they lay before us stupendous facts, which we are called upon to recognise and expound in order to solve this exalted problem. If physicians cannot boast of having unrolled these records with the avidity of true explorers of Nature, they may find some excuse in the nature of the inquiry—for the characters are dead, and the spirits of which they are the magic