The black death and the dancing mania / from the German of J.F.C. Hecker, tr. by B.G. Babington.

  • Justus Friedrich Carl Hecker
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The black death and the dancing mania / from the German of J.F.C. Hecker, tr. by B.G. Babington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library at Emory University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library, Emory University.

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    permitted it, were carried into effect in their houses. Even a total separation of the sick from the healthy, that indispensable means of protection against infection by contact, was proposed by physicians of the second cen- tury after Christ, in order to check the spreading of leprosy. But it was decidedly opposed, because, as it was alleged, the healing art ought] not to be guilty of such harshness. This mildness of the ancients, in whose manner of thinking inhumanity was so often and so undisguisedly conspicuous, might excite surprise if it were anything more than apparent. The true ground of the neglect of public protection against pes- tilential diseases lay in the general notion and constitu- tion of human society—it lay in the disregard of human life, of which the great nations of antiquity have given proofs in every page of their history. Let it not be supposed that they wanted knowledge re- specting the propagation of contagious diseases. On the contrary, they were as well informed on this subject as the moderns; but this was shown where in- dividual property, not where human life, on the grand scale was to be protected. Hence the ancients made a general practice of arresting the progress of murrains among cattle by a separation of the diseased from the healthy. Their herds alone enjoyed that protection which they held it impracticable to extend to human society, because they had no wish to do so. That the governments in the fourteenth century were not yet so
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