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These insensitive areas, known as stigmata, played a very important role in the epidemic of witchcraft hunting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the witch was so diagnosed if she felt no pain when a needle was thrust into her. Mankind has often enough worshiped the insane and mentally aberrant and has as often been diabolically cruel to them.
Of an art such as medicine, which even in those times had a long and rational tradition behind it, it is impossible to give more than the merest glimpse in such a review as this. The actual practice is far too complex to set down briefly. This is especially the case with the ancient teaching as regards epidemic disease at which we must cursorily glance.
An epidemic of the gapes, infecting the entire race of local hens, had caused the disappearance of every egg from the market. And all those other countless things which a family requires for its maintenance soap and cloth and earthenware and kitchen utensils and oils they have become rarities; the natives are learning to subsist without them; relapsing into a kind of barbarism.
These objects as we later found were enemy troops clad in white clothing which made it almost impossible to detect them. About this time an epidemic of "flu" broke out in some of the villages.
In 1879, however, no one was drowned, or crushed to death, but a dreadful epidemic of cholera broke out. We were disgusted at this impediment; but had to keep at a distance in spite of our impatience to see Hardwar. And unable to behold distant summits of old Himavat ourselves, we had in the meanwhile to be contented with what we could hear about him from other people.
About the same time some of the Crees also reached the settlement, and the infection thus communicated from both quarters spread with amazing rapidity. Nor is this enormous percentage of deaths very much to be wondered at when we consider the circumstances attending this epidemic.
It's the judicial frame of mind, not the sympathetic, which is the essential one." I thoroughly agreed with Patterson in what he said. It happened, however, that very shortly afterwards the epidemic of influenza broke out, and we were all worked to death. One morning I met Patterson on my round, and found him looking rather pale and fagged out. He made the same remark about me.
So intensely "catching" is it, that letters written by sufferers have been known to infect the correspondents who received them in a distant town, and become the starting-point of a local epidemic.
It is a sort of moral epidemic, I believe, springing from vanity and selfishness; for when a man despises and detests his fellow-creatures, he necessarily assumes that he is much better than the rest of the world. The doctrine of such men amounts to this: "Let us admire only one another, if we turn the rest of mankind into a mere mob, we shall appear like demi-gods on earth."
Tretherick at the theatre and church; his professional habits debarring him from ordinary social intercourse, and indeed any other than the most formal public contact with the sex. As this gentleman had made a snug fortune during the felicitous prevalence of a severe epidemic, the colonel regarded him as a dangerous rival.
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