eving that in the fourteenth century
men of this kind were publicly questioned regarding their views; and it
is, therefore, the more necessary that impartial history should take up
their cause, and do justice to their merits.

The first notice on this subject is due to a very celebrated teacher in
Perugia, Gentilis of Foligno, who, on the 18th of June, 1348, fell a
sacrifice to the plague, in the faithful discharge of his duty. Attached
to Arabian doctrines, and to the universally respected Galen, he, in
common with all his contemporaries, believed in a putrid corruption of
the blood in the lungs and in the heart, which was occasioned by the
pestilential atmosphere, and was forthwith communicated to the whole
body. He thought, therefore, that everything depended upon a sufficient
purification of the air, by means of large blazing fires of odoriferous
wood, in the vicinity of the healthy as well as of the sick, and also
upon an appropriate manner of living, so that the putridity might not
overpower the diseased. In conformity with notions derived from the
ancients, he depended upon bleeding and purging, at the commencement of
the attack, for the purpose of purification; ordered the healthy to wash
themselves frequently with vinegar or wine, to sprinkle their dwellings
with vinegar, and to smell often to camphor, or other volatile
substances. Hereupon he gave, after the Arabian fashion, detailed rules,
with an abundance of different medicines, of whose healing powers
wonderful things were believed. He had little stress upon super-lunar
influences, so far as respected the malady itself; on which account, he
did not enter into the great controversies of the astrologers, but always
kept in view, as an object of medical attention, the corruption of the
blood in the lungs and heart. He believed in a progressive infection
from country to country, according to the notions of the present day; and
the contagious power of the disease, even in the vicinity of those
affected by plague, was, in his opinion, beyond all doubt. On this point
intelligent contemporaries were all agreed; and, in truth, it required no
great genius to be convinced of so palpable a fact. Besides, correct
notions of contagion have descended from remote antiquity, and were
maintained unchanged in the fourteenth century. So far back as the age
of Plato a knowledge of the contagious power of malignant inflammations
of the eye, of which also no physician of