The volcanic origin of epidemics / by John Parkin.

  • John Parkin
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The volcanic origin of epidemics / by John Parkin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    malaria—has been applied by Italian writers, and that of marsh poison by English ones. Hippocrates, however, made a distinction between endemics and epidemics, for although aware that the former were caused by the extri- cation of a deleterious substance from the soil, he ascribed the latter to a something divine—to theion—or to some unknown and inexplicable cause. Sydenham, the father of English medicine, arrived at a similar conclusion. He thought, that epidemic diseases were to be ascribed to “ a hidden constitution of the air.” Hence the term “ epi- demic constitution,” which has been employed from that time to the present, in order to designate that peculiar, occult state of the atmosphere, which is supposed to give origin to this class of diseases. Other writers, more bold, or else dissatisfied with this state of ignorance, have attempted to define this particular condition of the atmo- sphere—a circumstance not to be wondered at, when we find, that great and unusual atmospherical vicissitudes are invariably observed at epidemic periods. Generally speaking, epidemic diseases have been pre ceded by unusual heat and drought; while they usually return during the summer of cold climates, and the hot months of intertropical ones. Hence, heat has been re- garded, by some writers, as one of the chief, exciting causes of pestilence—a very old idea. It is to the arrows of Apollo, or the rays of the sun, that Homer ascribed the cause of the pestilence from which the Greeks suffered at the siege of Troy. “ On mules and dogs the infection first began; and, then, the vengeful arrows fixed in man.” Hippocrates has also remarked, that the constitution of the air, which preceded pestilential diseases, was attended, in that part of the world (Greece), by b 2
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