Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/569

Rh settled districts of the further West as far as Idaho, Oregon and California. The sweep of the malady has included individuals of the white race, the Indians and the negroes, the well-to-do and the poor, the filthy and the cleanly, people of all sorts and conditions. If the results had been in any considerable proportion grave, the entire country would have been alarmed, and the attention of all classes concentrated with a profound interest upon the earliest invasion and progress of the disease in the several localities where it spread. But, fortunately, the results were mild, so mild, indeed, that the nature of the epidemic, certainly at first, was misunderstood in almost all the places where its victims were discovered. Medical men, well trained in their profession, in many cases could not recognize the nature of the malady by reason of the special features it now for the first time presented. Some physicians, even after demonstration by experts of the character of the symptoms before their eyes, refused to accept the inevitable conclusions. Though obviously a contagious disease and one spreading in epidemic form in an astonishingly large number of villages and towns. East and West, the victims of the disease, because of the very general misapprehension respecting its nature, were permitted free access to those not affected. In many such centers of population, persons betraying all the external evidences of the disease attended churches, schools and theaters; delivered milk, groceries and other provisions at the houses of their customers; officiated in public stations; and even slept in beds occupied by other non-infected members of the same family. A study of the special character of this epidemic possesses interest, because, as a matter of fact, the malady was smallpox.

The history of smallpox in classical career has been studied with a patient faithfulness and with an attention to every detail that is set forth fully in most of the text-books. Few trained physicians are ignorant of the essential facts thus collated. In the late epidemic visiting this country, confusion in many cases arose from the total failure of the symptoms of the disease to correspond with the classical types previously portrayed in the books and encountered in practice. Almost all the histories of smallpox in the past have been descriptive of epidemics that spread among a people either previously unprotected from the disease by modern methods, or through the medium of individuals not so protected. It might, however, have been expected that an epidemic of disease occurring during the last century and another at the beginning of the present, operating on a different soil and under different conditions, would exhibit differences in type.

That smallpox may be so modified as to be stripped of every one of its formidable features has long been known. The so-called variola sine variolis (smallpox without pocks) is not a fiction of the schools, but a fact of experience. In these instances, after a day or two in