therefore reserved this remedy for the plethoric; especially for
the papal courtiers and the hypocritical priests, whom he saw
gratifying their sensual desires, and imitating Epicurus, whilst
they pompously pretended to follow Christ. He recommended burning
the boils with a red-hot iron only in the plague without fever,
which occurred in single cases; and was always ready to correct
those over-hasty surgeons who, with fire and violent remedies, did
irremediable injury to their patients. Michael Savonarola,
professor in Ferrara (1462), reasoning on the susceptibility of
the human frame to the influence of pestilential infection, as the
cause of such various modifications of disease, expresses himself
as a modern physician would on this point; and an adoption of the
principle of contagion was the foundation of his definition of the
plague. No less worthy of observation are the views of the
celebrated Valescus of Taranta, who, during the final visitation
of the Black Death, in 1382, practised as a physician at
Montpellier, and handed down to posterity what has been repeated
in innumerable treatises on plague, which were written during the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Of all these notions and views regarding the plague, whose
development we have represented, there are two especially, which
are prominent in historical importance:- 1st, The opinion of
learned physicians, that the pestilence, or epidemic constitution,
is the parent of various kinds of disease; that the plague
sometimes, indeed, but by no means always, originates from it:
that, to speak in the language of the moderns, the pestilence
bears the same relation to contagion that a predisposing cause
does to an occasional cause; and 2ndly, the universal conviction
of the contagious power of that disease.