Hygeia, a City of Health by Benjamin Ward Richardson
page 9 of 33 (27%)
page 9 of 33 (27%)
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sanitary code. If this were so, a formula for a city of health were
practically useless. The city would come without the special call for it. I think it probable the city would come in the manner described, but how long it would be coming is hard to say, for whatever great results have followed civilisation, the most that has occurred has been an unexpected, unexplained, and therefore uncertain arrest of the spread of the grand physical scourges of mankind. The phenomena have been suppressed, but the root of not one of them has been touched. Still in our midst are thousands of enfeebled human organisms which only are comparable with the savage. Still are left amongst us the bases of all the diseases that, up to the present hour, have afflicted humanity. The existing calendar of diseases, studied in connection with the classical history of the diseases written for us by the longest unbroken line of authorities in the world of letters, shows, in unmistakable language, that the imposition of every known malady of man is coeval with every phase of his recorded life on the planet. No malady, once originated, has ever actually died out; many remain as potent as ever. That wasting fatal scourge, pulmonary consumption, is the same in character as when Coelius Aurelianus gave it description. The cancer of to-day is the cancer known to Paulus Eginæta. The Black Death, though its name is gone, lingers in malignant typhus. The great plague of Athens is the modern great plague of England, scarlet fever. The dancing mania of the Middle Ages and the convulsionary epidemic of Montmartre, subdued in their violence, are still to be seen in some American communities, and even at this hour in the New Forest of England. Small-pox, when the blessed protection of vaccination is withdrawn, is the same virulent destroyer as it was when the Arabian |
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