Epidemics : their origin and prevention / by J. Foster Palmer.

  • Palmer, J. Foster (James Foster)
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Epidemics : their origin and prevention / by J. Foster Palmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    clerical and legal professions, especially those of the latter who are connected with the administration of the criminal law, are usually more impressed with the very obvious effects of intemperance. Immorality^ however^ is more subtle in its effects, and in rendering ])eople susceptible to epidemic disease there can be little doubt it is the more potent. It is possibly for this reason that the Turks, though abstainers, are more subject to plague than Europeans generally, their religion in this respect not erring on the side of severity and asceticism. In marked contrast to them siand the Jews, whose well-known longevity, uncon- querable vitality, and unequalled mental scope and power of endurance, are to a great extent the outcome of their long training under stricter laws and a higher ideal, by following which, however imperfectly, they had become, long before the commencement of the Christian era, distinguished by the greater purity of their morals from the Asiatic nations around them. 12. Mental Shock.—We all know the well-worn fable which relates that the plague, on leaving a cer- tain city, encountered a gentleman who was proceed- ing towards it with the object, probably, of collecting statistics from all available sources. Plague, said the statistician, I hear you have killed ten thousand people in the city; is it so ? No,'^ said the plague ; I only killed a thousand ; fear killed the rest. Few ancient fables, perhaps, have ever had a more slender foundation in fact. Fear has been constantly credited with an amount of disease and death to which it can lay no claim. Not onl3^ has its effect been greatly ex- aggerated, but there is no proof that fear, as a purely mental condition, is by itself capable of influencing the susceptibility to disease. Excessive fear may in some cases be due to a condition of bodily weakness which renders its subject more liable to attacks, but fear as a