The true northerner. [volume] (Paw Paw, Mich.) 1855-1920, 1876-05-05

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The plague, IL seems clear, is once
more threatening the confines of En-;
rope. Since the beginning of March
it has reached Bagdad, in which city
in 1881 it destroyed 10000 out OF
100, 900 people. The new outbreak,
however, shows much of the old and
mysterious fierceness before which med
ical science for many centuries recoiled
in despair. There is no reason TO ex-
pect 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 prevailing. Hap
PLY there is not the least ground for
believing that the conditions FOR its re-
production in Western Europe any
longer exist. Thus we have hardly
more than q scientific interest in the
movement of distant but most deadly
enemy. There is not much more chance
of an invasion of England by the plague
than there is of the destruction of Lon
don by an earthquake like that of Lis
bon. No calamity, however, in the his.
tory of the human race has produced so
crushing an effect upon the imagina-
ton as the great epidemic of the plague.
In one week 7,165 persons were kille
by the pestilence in london, and the
entire number of deaths in the year
within the bills of mortality reached the
enormous totol of 6S, 900 out of popu-
lation of 100000. Since that time no
general visitation of the plague has
been known in England or in the neigh
boring countries of Western Europe
Yet in 1712 it attacked Copenhagen in
1920 Marseilles, where it slew more
than half the inhabitants in 1771 Mos
COW; in 1913 Malta in 1916 Calabria
in 1918 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
outside 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 organ.
ization has been steadily lessened.
} "Ihe plague itself is a malignant
fever analogous to typhus, with a pc
culiar influence over the lymphatic sys-
tenn. The persons subject to this sort
of distemper are weakly in constitution,
dwelling in the midst of damp and dirt,
and generally of gross habits of living. 1
When the true plague, stirred in its
ancient source and seminary, TO quote
Gibbons phrase, in the Egyptian or
Syrian cities, by some such accident as
an unhealthy season, extends its infec-
ton, it fixes itself where q 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 condi-
tions invite it's visits. Though much
remains to be done in our own and |
countries by way of sani-
tary Improvement, what has been done,
if we compare the life of our contem-
poraries with that of our ancestors of
two centuries ago, marks q surprising |
advance. The worst rookery in modern
London could not as nursery for the
of the pestilence be |
with the chief cities of the |
East. Moreover, the collapse of the |
nervous powers, which is the especial |
of this frightful malady, |
is favored 10y terror and helplessness,
and an active-minded modern commu-
nifty, which, in the worst event, would
theoretically combat even the plague
with all the resources of medical science,
could no more be reduced to the des-
pair of the Oriental when he finds HIM
self 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 unexpected comet in the
sky. Thus in modern England-in-
deed, throughout Western Europe gen.
erally-neither the material nor the
moral conditions exist which invite the
inroads of the plague. London Times.