ing sickness, were alike plagues
and products of times when table-scraps were thrown on the dining-room
floor and covered daily with fresh rushes for a week at a stretch, and
fertilizer accumulated in a living-room as now in a modern stable.
Clothing was put on for the season, shirts were unknown, and strong
perfumes took the place of a bath. Michelet's famous characterization of
the Middle Ages in one phrase as _Un mille ans sans bain_ (a thousand
years without a bath) was painfully accurate.

Doubtless certain habits of our own to-day will be regarded with equal
disgust by our descendants. Typhus, by the way, may possibly be
remembered by the dramatic "Black Assize" of Oxford, in 1577, in which
not merely the wretched prisoners in the jail, but the jurors, the
lawyers, the judges, and every official of the court were attacked, and
many of them died.

It was only in 1856 that the method of transmission of the disease was
clearly recognized, and in 1880 that the bacillus was discovered and
identified by the bacteriologist Eberth, whose name it bears, so that it
is only within the last thirty years that real weapons have been put
into our hands with which to begin a fight of extermination against the
disease.

What is the habitat of our organism, and is it increasing its spread?
Its habitat is the entire civilized world, and it goes wherever
civilization goes. In this sense its spread is increasing, but, in every
other, we have good ground for believing that it is on the wane.
Positive assurance, either one way or the other, is, of course,
impossible, simply for the reason that the disease was not recognized
until such a short time ago that no statistics of any real value for
comparison are available; and, secondly, because even to-day, on account
of its insidious character and the astonishing variety of its forms, and
degrees of mildness and virulence, a considerable percentage of cases
are yet unrecognized and unreported.

It might be mentioned in passing that this statement applies to the
alleged increase of nearly all diseases which are popularly believed to
be modern inventions, like appendicitis, insanity, and cancer. We have
no statistics more than thirty years old which are of real value for
purposes of comparison.

However, when it comes to the number of deaths from the disease, there
is a striking and gratifying diminution for twenty years past, which is
increasing in ratio instead of diminishing. That we