Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/78

70 There is no known racial immunity to this disease. It is alike fatal to Mongolians, Africans, and Europeans. It has prevailed in the marshes along the Euphrates and on the Himalayas; in densely populated cities and in sparsely settled rural districts; on the sands of Egypt and amid the snows of Norway.

Climate and season have been studied in order to establish between them and the plague a causal relationship. Epidemics have followed prolonged droughts, and have prevailed during rainy seasons. The wind may blow where it listeth, but the bacillus heedeth it not. The epidemic at Hong Kong in 1894 appeared after a prolonged season of dry weather. Rain was anxiously looked for—probably prayed for. It was said. All will be well when the rain comes. At last the rain did come, and with it the disease seemed to be refreshed and the number of deaths was multiplied. The attempt to find in meteorological conditions a cause for our ills is a relic of the superstition of ages when it was believed that disease was sent from heaven to afflict man for his sins, and was due to the anger of the gods.

Overcrowding is undoubtedly a factor in the distribution of this disease, as it is of all other infectious diseases, simply because it renders transmission of the germ from one to the other more speedy and certain; but that the disease can be due to overcrowding is, in the present state of our knowledge, an absurdity.

Poverty and famine are factors in the propagation of the disease. Want of proper food renders the individual more susceptible. This has been demonstrated in case of more than one infectious disease by experiments upon the lower animals. Privation has always been associated with the most notable outbreaks of the plagues. As stated in the beginning of this paper, famine and disease are twin brothers, inseparable. Where one of them dwells there the other may be found. This is undoubtedly the reason why this disease has always found a home in the Levantine. Cantline says: "In the densely packed cities of Asia the poor exist forever on the fringe of destitution, and the least rise in the price of food brings scarcity, so that the term, 'the poor man's plague,' holds good for all time."

There has been much written concerning the period of incubation of this disease, but necessarily all is indefinite. Because a well man comes in contact with a sick one on a certain day, and manifests the first symptoms of the disease ten days later, does not prove that the period of incubation is ten days. The well man may have carried on his person the bacillus from the sick-room, and any time subsequent thereto it may have been introduced into the body. All that is said about the period of incubation of the infectious disease is based on the old theory—long since exploded—that the well man breathes in the miasm at the time of his