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The work of the modern fathers of epidemiology was consciously based on Hippocrates. The ancients knew almost nothing of infection as applied specifically to disease. All early peoples including Greeks and Romans believed in the transmission of qualities from object to object. Thus purity and impurity and good and bad luck were infections, and diseases were held to be infections in that sense.
By a series of carefully collated observations as to how regions, seasons, and years differed from each other, they succeeded in laying the basis of a rational study of epidemiology which gave rise to the notion of an 'epidemic constitution' of the different years, a conception which was very fertile and stimulating to the great clinicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is by no means without value even for the modern epidemiologist.
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