Medical notes and reflections / By Sir Henry Holland, bart. ... From the 3d London ed.

  • Holland, Henry, Sir, 1788-1873.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical notes and reflections / By Sir Henry Holland, bart. ... From the 3d London ed. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    485/540 (page 479)
    partial records give faint idea of such a pestilence as that last named, which, about the middle of the 14th century, spread into every corner of Europe; producing a mortality beside which the history of Cholera is a fair page to look upon.1 The Sweating Sickness, as manifested in its different irruptions upon England and all Europe, from 1485 to 1550, is another example of these extraordinary wandering pestilences ; affording in its history (as does also the Black Death) so many striking analogies to that of Cholera, as regards the manner of diffusion and other incidents of the disease, that it is impossible not to suppose some connec- tion of physical origin. The virus of the diseases is doubtless not identical; but where the effects are thus far alike, the causes cannot be without some certain common relation. I am unable to pursue this topic here, but it well merits further inquiry. The whole subject of the migration, presumed in our hypo- thesis, will occur as one of its great difficulties; seeing that we have no evidence of any of similar extent in the animal kingdom; and that the manner and duration of insect life are in many re- spects opposed to one, which involves such variety of country and climate; most of the species known to us appearing to be submitted to geographical distribution, like plants, and the other classes of the animal kingdom. What may be said in reply (even admitting the restriction to insect life, properly so termed) is, that we are singularly ignorant of all that relates to animal migrations in general;—that our knowledge becomes less as we descend to the more minute forms of life;—that the facts known respecting the occurrence of insect swarms meet some of these objections;—that different insect species vary infinitely in their habits and capacity for diffusion ;—that the ova themselves may be widely disseminated, independently of the living animal migrations ;—and that the rapidity of propagation and change, incident generally to this part of the animal creation, if intro- 1 In his treatise on this fatal epidemic (Sclncarze Tod) Heeker calculates that twenty-five millions of people may have perished in Europe alone. But statistical reports were not then invented ; and the sources of his calculation are so vague, and the original details so obviously exaggerated, that it is impossible to assent to this belief. Numbers, ever the subject of popular error, are not likely to have been very exactly dealt with at a time of so great calamity.