was nearly extinct
after carrying off about 100,000 victims. In our days we can hardly
comprehend the filthy hygienic conditions under which the people in the
cities lived, and it was probably to this fact that the growth and
perpetuation of this plague was due.

As to the bubonic plague recently raging in Camptown, China, Mary Niles
says that it was the same disease as the great London plague, and was
characterized mainly by glandular enlargement. It had not appeared in
the Canton district for forty years or more, though it was endemic in
Yunnan. In some places it began in the winter; and as early as January
she herself found the first case in Canton in an infected house. In no
case was direct contagiousness found to exist. The glands enlarged
twelve hours after the fever began, and sometimes suppurated in
nonfatal cases in a short time. Kitasato has recently announced the
discovery of the specific cause of the bubonic plague.

Sweating Sickness.--According to Hecker, very shortly after Henry's
triumphant march from Bosworth Field, and his entry into the capital on
August 8, 1485, the sweating sickness began its ravages among the
people of the densely populated city. According to Lord Bacon the
disease began about September 21st, and lasted to the end of October,
1485. The physicians could do little or nothing for the people, and
seemed to take no account of the clinical history of the disease,--in
this respect not unlike the Greek physicians who for four hundred years
paid no attention to small-pox because they could find no description
of it in the immortal works of Galen. The causes seemed to be
uncleanliness, gluttony, immoderate drinking, and also severe
inundations leaving decaying vegetation. Richmond's army has been
considered a factor in the germination of the seeds of pestilent
disorder which broke out soon after in the camps of Litchfield, and on
the banks of the Severn.

Sweating sickness was an inflammatory rheumatic fever, with great
disorder of the nervous system, and was characterized by a profuse and
injurious perspiration. In the English epidemic the brain, meninges,
and the nerves were affected in a peculiar manner. The functions of the
pneumogastric nerves were violently disordered in this disease, as was
shown by the oppressed respiration and extreme anxiety, with nausea and
vomiting,--symptoms to which modern physicians attach much importance.
The stupor and profound lethargy show that there w