Essay on the origin, symptoms, and treatment, of cholera morbus, and of other epidemic diseases : with a view to the improvement of sanitary regulations / [T. Forster].

  • Thomas Ignatius Maria Forster
Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essay on the origin, symptoms, and treatment, of cholera morbus, and of other epidemic diseases : with a view to the improvement of sanitary regulations / [T. Forster]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    In the mean time I will proceed to examine a few more cases in point, taken from an ample store of historical records, which [ have long been gathering on the subject of pestilence. I might go as far back as the famous plague of Athens, described by Thucydides, which was preceded by darkness and extraordinary electrical phenomena; or, de- scending to more recent times, I might instance the prodigies that forerun the great plague of Florence, so eloquently described by Boccacio. Who is ignorant of the portentous appearances of the sky, which occurred before the great pestilence about B. C. 44, and which the superstitious flatterers of princes in those days regarded as prophetic of the death of Czesar; when, as Virgil says, Sol etiam extincto miseratus Cesare Romam, cum caput obscura nitidum ferrugine texit, or as Ovid more aptly has it, Phaedt quoque tristis imago Lurida sollicitis probabat lumina terris. At the same time we are told Nec dire toties arsere cometae 2% About 30 years B.C. Jerusalem was devastated by a pestilence which, according to Dion Cassius, followed a comet. Atthe same time was an overflowing of the Tiber, and an epidemic at Rome, which followed the hard winter and unusual misplacement of phenomena, to which Horace’s well known Ode, beginning Jam satis terris nivis, &c. alludes. The poet, persuaded of solar and lunar influence over these events, in Ode 21 to Apollo, soon after, describes the benign influence of the sun, in a beautiful play of * The scientific Editor of that useful periodical, the Lancet, has taken me vp hastily ina note inthe No. for October 22d, for having speculated on the ancient opinion that comets were signs of pestilence. He says, ‘* We are surprised that so practical a mau as Dr. Forster should have even hinted at such a cause.” Now, infact, the notion was Kepler’s and not mine; what I contend for is the disturbed state of the atmosphere in epidemic periods; and in alluding to the opinion that such disturbance was coincident with comets I never pre- tended, like the ‘* philosopher,” David Hume, that coincidence was causation ; nor should [ have mentioned it at all, only in searching into phenomena of an obscure origin, we are bound not to pass over with supercilious haste, any Opinions which great men have held on the subject. I alluded to the great comet coming next year, merely as to a curious coincidence calculated to revive the ancient superstition.
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