Variola And Vaccinia History And Description PDF Download

Excerpt from Variola and Vaccinia, History and Description: Hints Relating to the Propagation of Vaccine Virus, Certain Anomalies in the Course of the Vaccine Disease; With Illustration No definite knowledge of the origin of the destructive plague, small-pox, has been discovered by writers on the subject, but histories and traditions of Eastern nations, especially of China and Hindostan, refer its commencement to a remote period before the Christian era. Most authorities place the date of its appearance in Egypt about A. D. 544, although it is believed by some writers that Philo, a Jewish philosopher, mentioned it in a work on the Life of Moses, written in the first century. It spread into Asia and Africa during the sixth and seventh centuries, and into the countries of Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries. The Spaniards carried it into Cuba and San Domingo soon after the discovery of America. It raged in Mexico in 1527, its victims numbering millions. From that date it gradually extended over the whole American continent. The first accurate and scientific description of the disease came from Rhazes, a celebrated Arabian physician, A. D. 925-926. Records of historians and travellers from the earliest ages teem with dismal details of the destruction of human life by this contagion. Its awful visitations seem to have been common throughout the world. The annual mortality from small-pox in England is said to have averaged about three thousand to each million of inhabitants. In France thirty thousand victims perished each year. In the Russian Empire it is reported to have been so malignant as to have cut off two millions of inhabitants in a single year. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.