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Chapter 14 - From Fetich to Hygiene
Gradual Decay of Theological Views Regarding Sanitation
We have seen how powerful in various nations especially
obedient to theology were the forces working in opposition to the
evolution of hygiene, and we shall find this same opposition,
less effective, it is true, but still acting with great power, in
countries which had become somewhat emancipated from theological
control. In England, during the medieval period, persecutions of
Jews were occasionally resorted to, and here and there we hear of
persecutions of witches; but, as torture was rarely used in
England, there were, from those charged with producing plague,
few of those torture-born confessions which in other countries
gave rise to widespread cruelties. Down to the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the filthiness in the ordinary mode of life
in England was such as we can now hardly conceive: fermenting
organic material was allowed to accumulate and become a part of
the earthen floors of rural dwellings; and this undoubtedly
developed the germs of many diseases. In his noted letter to the
physician of Cardinal Wolsey, Erasmus describes the filth thus
incorporated into the floors of English houses, and, what is of
far more importance, he shows an inkling of the true cause of the
wasting diseases of the period. He says, "If I entered into a
chamber which had been uninhabited for months, I was immediately
seized with a fever." He ascribed the fearful plague of the
sweating sickness to this cause. So, too, the noted Dr. Caius
advised sanitary precautions against the plague, and in
after-generations, Mead, Pringle, and others urged them; but the
prevailing thought was too strong, and little was done. Even the
floor of the presence chamber of Queen Elizabeth in Greenwich
Palace was "covered with hay, after the English fashion," as one
of the chroniclers tells us.
In the seventeenth century, aid in these great scourges was
mainly sought in special church services. The foremost English
churchmen during that century being greatly given to study of the
early fathers of the Church; the theological theory of disease,
so dear to the fathers, still held sway, and this was the case
when the various visitations reached their climax in the great
plague of London in 1665, which swept off more than a hundred
thousand people from that city. The attempts at meeting it by
sanitary measures were few and poor; the medical system of the
time was still largely tinctured by superstitions resulting from
medieval modes of thought; hence that plague was generally
attributed to the Divine wrath caused by "the prophaning of the
Sabbath." Texts from Numbers, the Psalms, Zechariah, and the
Apocalypse were dwelt upon in the pulpits to show that plagues
are sent by the Almighty to punish sin; and perhaps the most
ghastly figure among all those fearful scenes described by De Foe
is that of the naked fanatic walking up and down the streets with
a pan of fiery coals upon his head, and, after the manner of
Jonah at Nineveh, proclaiming woe to the city, and its
destruction in forty days.
That sin caused this plague is certain, but it was sanitary
sin. Both before and after this culmination of the disease cases
of plague were constantly occurring in London throughout the
seventeenth century; but about the beginning of the eighteenth
century it began to disappear. The great fire had done a good
work by sweeping off many causes and centres of infection, and
there had come wider streets, better pavements, and improved
water supply; so that, with the disappearance of the plague,
other diseases, especially dysenteries, which had formerly raged
in the city, became much less frequent.
But, while these epidemics were thus checked in London,
others developed by sanitary ignorance raged fearfully both there
and elsewhere, and of these perhaps the most fearful was the jail
fever. The prisons of that period were vile beyond belief. Men
were confined in dungeons rarely if ever disinfected after the
death of previous occupants, and on corridors connecting directly
with the foulest sewers: there was no proper disinfection,
ventilation, or drainage; hence in most of the large prisons for
criminals or debtors the jail fever was supreme, and from these
centres it frequently spread through the adjacent towns. This was
especially the case during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. In the Black Assize at Oxford, in 1577, the chief
baron, the sheriff, and about three hundred men died within forty
hours. Lord Bacon declared the jail fever "the most pernicious
infection next to the plague." In 1730, at the Dorsetshire
Assize, the chief baron and many lawyers were killed by it. The
High Sheriff of Somerset also took the disease and died. A single
Scotch regiment, being infected from some prisoners, lost no less
than two hundred. In 1750 the disease was so virulent at Newgate,
in the heart of London, that two judges, the lord mayor, sundry
aldermen, and many others, died of it.
It is worth noting that, while efforts at sanitary dealing
with this state of things were few, the theological spirit
developed a new and special form of prayer for the sufferers and
placed it in the Irish Prayer Book.
These forms of prayer seem to have been the main reliance
through the first half of the eighteenth century. But about 1750
began the work of John Howard, who visited the prisons of
England, made known their condition to the world, and never
rested until they were greatly improved. Then he applied the same
benevolent activity to prisons in other countries, in the far
East, and in southern Europe, and finally laid down his life, a
victim to disease contracted on one of his missions of mercy; but
the hygienic reforms he began were developed more and more until
this fearful blot upon modern civilization was removed.
The same thing was seen in the Protestant colonies of
America; but here, while plagues were steadily attributed to
Divine wrath or Satanic malice, there was one case in which it
was claimed that such a visitation was due to the Divine mercy.
The pestilence among the Indians, before the arrival of the
Plymouth Colony, was attributed in a notable work of that period
to the Divine purpose of clearing New England for the heralds of
the gospel; on the other hand, the plagues which destroyed the
white population were attributed by the same authority to devils
and witches. In Cotton Mather's Wonder of the Invisible World,
published at Boston in 1693, we have striking examples of this.
The great Puritan divine tells us:
"Plagues are some of those woes, with which the Divil
troubles us. It is said of the Israelites, in 1 Cor. 10. 10.
They were destroyed of the destroyer. That is, they had the
Plague among them. 'Tis the Destroyer, or the Divil, that
scatters Plagues about the World: Pestilential and Contagious
Diseases, 'tis the Divel, who do's oftentimes Invade us with
them. 'Tis no uneasy thing, for the Divel, to impregnate the Air
about us, with such Malignant Salts, as meeting with the Salt of
our Microcosm, shall immediately cast us into that Fermentation
and Putrefaction, which will utterly dissolve All the Vital Tyes
within us; Ev'n as an Aqua Fortis, made with a conjuuction of
Nitre and Vitriol, Corrodes what it Siezes upon. And when the
Divel has raised those Arsenical Fumes, which become Venomous.
Quivers full of Terrible Arrows, how easily can he shoot the
deleterious Miasms into those Juices or Bowels of Men's Bodies,
which will soon Enflame them with a Mortal Fire! Hence come such
Plagues, as that Beesome of Destruction which within our memory
swept away such a throng of people from one English City in one
Visitation: and hence those Infectious Feavers, which are but so
many Disguised Plagues among us, Causing Epidemical Desolations."
Mather gives several instances of witches causing diseases,
and speaks of "some long Bow'd down under such a Spirit of
Infirmity" being "Marvelously Recovered upon the Death of the
Witches," of which he gives an instance. He also cites a case
where a patient "was brought unto death's door and so remained
until the witch was taken and carried away by the constable, when
he began at once to recover and was soon well."
In France we see, during generation after generation, a
similar history evolved; pestilence after pestilence came, and
was met by various fetiches. Noteworthy is the plague at
Marseilles near the beginning of the last century. The chronicles
of its sway are ghastly. They speak of great heaps of the
unburied dead in the public places, "forming pestilential
volcanoes"; of plague-stricken men and women in delirium
wandering naked through the streets; of churches and shrines
thronged with great crowds shrieking for mercy; of other crowds
flinging themselves into the wildest debauchery; of robber bands
assassinating the dying and plundering the dead; of three
thousand neglected children collected in one hospital and then
left to die; and of the death-roll numbering at last fifty
thousand out of a population of less than ninety thousand.
In the midst of these fearful scenes stood a body of men and
women worthy to be held in eternal honour - the physicians from
Paris and Montpellier; the mayor of the city, and one or two of
his associates; but, above all, the Chevalier Roze and Bishop
Belzunce. The history of these men may well make us glory in
human nature; but in all this noble group the figure of Belzunce
is the most striking. Nobly and firmly, when so many others even
among the regular and secular ecclesiastics fled, he stood by his
flock: day and night he was at work in the hospitals, cheering
the living, comforting the dying, and doing what was possible for
the decent disposal of the dead. In him were united the, two
great antagonistic currents of religion and of theology. As a
theologian he organized processions and expiatory services,
which, it must be confessed, rather increased the disease than
diminished it; moreover, he accepted that wild dream of a
hysterical nun - the worship of the material, physical sacred
heart of Jesus - and was one of the first to consecrate his diocese
to it; but, on the other hand, the religious spirit gave in him
one of its most beautiful manifestations in that or any other
century; justly have the people of Marseilles placed his statue
in the midst of their city in an attitude of prayer and blessing.
In every part of Europe and America, down to a recent
period, we find pestilences resulting from carelessness or
superstition still called "inscrutable providences." As late as
the end of the eighteenth century, when great epidemics made
fearful havoc in Austria, the main means against them seem to
have been grovelling before the image of St. Sebastian and
calling in special "witch-doctors" - that is, monks who cast out
devils. To seek the aid of physicians was, in the neighbourhood
of these monastic centres, very generally considered impious, and
the enormous death rate in such neighbourhoods was only
diminished in the present century, when scientific hygiene began
to make its way.
The old view of pestilence had also its full course in
Calvinistic Scotland; the only difference being that, while in
Roman Catholic countries relief was sought by fetiches, gifts,
processions, exorcisms, burnings of witches, and other works of
expiation, promoted by priests; in Scotland, after the
Reformation, it was sought in fast-days and executions of witches
promoted by Protestant elders. Accounts of the filthiness of
Scotch cities and villages, down to a period well within this
century, seem monstrous. All that in these 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.
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