American citizen. [volume] (Canton, Miss.) 1864-1890, 1876-05-06
The Plague in Europe.

Says the London Times: The plague,
it seems, is once more threatening the
confines of Europe. Since the begin
ming of March it has reached Bagdad,
in which city in 1881 it destroyed co.
900 out of 10000 people. The new
outbreak, however, shows much of the
old and mysterious fierceness before
which medical science for many CEN
turtles recoiled in despair. There is no
reason to expect that its ravages will be
limited to the provinces of Turkey in
Asia. Both in Egypt and in European
Turkey the conditions in which the
plague breeds and spreads are still pre-
vailing. Happily there is not the least
ground for believing that the condi-
tions for its reproduction in Western
Europe any longer exist. Thus we have
hardly more than scientific interest in
the movement of a distant but most
deadly enemy. There is not not much
more chance of an invasion of England
by the plague than there is of the de-
struction of London by an earthquake
like that of Lisbon. No calamity, how
ever, in the history of the human race,
has produced SO crushing an effect
upon the imagination as the great
epidemic of the plague. In
one week 7,165 persons were killed
by the pestilence in London, and the
entire number of deaths in the year
within the bills of mortality reached the
enormous total of 900 out of popu-
lation of 100000. Since that time no
general visitation of the plague has been
known in England or in the neighbour
ing countries of Western Europe. Yet
in 1712 it attached Copenhagen; in
1920 Marseilles, where it slew more
than half the inhabitants; in 1771 Mos
COW; in 1918 Malta; in 1916 Calabria;
in 1878 Corfu; and in 1919 there was
an outbreak in Silesia. These are the
chief known instances of the appear
ance of the plague in modern times out
side the dominions of Turkey and
Egypt. 1t appears, therefore, that as
modern life has been civilized, and,
above all, has been cleansed, the power
of the plague over the human organi-
cation has been steadily lessened.,
The plague itself is malignant fever
analogous to typhus, with peculiar
influence over the Emphatic system.
The persons subject to this sort of dis
temper are weakly in constitution,
dwelling in the midst of damp and dirt,
and generally of gross habits of living.
When true plague, stirred in its ancient
"source and seminary" to quote Glib
bon's phrase, in the Egyptian or Syrian
cities, by some such accident as an I'M
healthy season, extends its infection, it |
fixes itself where a population shown
to be prepared for its reception by the
prevalence of the lesser diseases already
mentioned is gathered together. On
the whole, it may be said that in
no Western cities do such favoring con-
ditions invite its visits. Though much
remains to be done in our own and
neighboring countries by way of sani-
tary improvement, what has been done,
if we compare the life of our cotem-
poraries with that of our ancestors of
two centuries ago, marks a surprising
advance. The worst rookery in modern
London could not as d nursery for the
of the pestilence be matched
with the chief cities of the East. More
over the collapse of the nervous pow
ers, which is the especial characters
tic of this frightful malady, is favored
by terror and helplessness, and an ac-
tive-minded modern community, which
in the worst event would energetically
combat even the plague with all the re-
sources of medical science, could no
more be reduced to the despair of the
Oriental when he finds himself face to
face with the contagion than it could be
terrified, as the people of London were
in 1865, by the ominous flaming of an
comet in the sky. Thus in
modern England-indeed, throughout
Western Europe generally-neither the
material nor the normal conditions exist
which invite the inroads of the plague.