ese days is swept into the
sewers was in those allowed to remain around the houses or thrown into
the streets. The old theological theory, that "vain is the help of man,"
checked scientific thought and paralyzed sanitary endeavour. The result
was natural: between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries thirty
notable epidemics swept the country, and some of them carried off
multitudes; but as a rule these never suggested sanitary improvement;
they were called "visitations," attributed to Divine wrath against human
sin, and the work of the authorities was to announce the particular
sin concerned and to declaim against it. Amazing theories were thus
propounded--theories which led to spasms of severity; and, in some of
these, offences generally punished much less severely were visited with
death. Every pulpit interpreted the ways of God to man in such seasons
so as rather to increase than to diminish the pestilence. The effect of
thus seeking supernatural causes rather than natural may be seen in such
facts as the death by plague of one fourth of the whole population of
the city of Perth in a single year of the fifteenth century, other towns
suffering similarly both then and afterward.

Here and there, physicians more wisely inspired endeavoured to push
sanitary measures, and in 1585 attempts were made to clean the streets
of Edinburgh; but the chroniclers tell us that "the magistrates and
ministers gave no heed." One sort of calamity, indeed, came in as a
mercy--the great fires which swept through the cities, clearing and
cleaning them. Though the town council of Edinburgh declared the noted
fire of 1700 "a fearful rebuke of God," it was observed that, after it
had done its work, disease and death were greatly diminished.(337)

(337) For the plague at Marseilles and its depopulation, see Henri
Martin, Histoire de France, vol. xv, especially document cited in
appendix; also Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. xliii; also Rambaud. For
the resort to witch doctors in Austria against pestilence, down to
the end of the eighteenth century, see Biedermann, Deutschland im
Achtzehnten Jahrhundert. For the resort to St. Sebastian, see the
widespread editions of the Vita et Gesta Sancti Sebastiani, contra
pestem patroni, prefaced with commendations from bishops and other high
ecclesiastics. The edition in the Cornell University Library is that of
Augsburg, 1693. For the reign of filth and pestilence in Scotland, see
Charles Roge