Weight o f Numbers

81

these were poor people, who lived in damp houses and slept on the ground.162 There is another difficulty: different diseases break out simultaneously. They have scarcely anything in common except infection, such illnesses as diphtheria, cholerine, typhoid fever, picotte, smallpox, purple fever, the bosse, dendo, tac or harion, the trousse galant or mal chaud; or again whooping cough, scarlatina, grippe, influenza.163 This list was drawn up for France, but it applies elsewhere with variations. The current diseases in England were intermittent fevers, sweat ing sickness, chlorosis or green sickness, jaundice, consumption, falling sickness or epilepsy, vertigo, rheumatism, gravel, stones.16 4 The undernourished, unprotected population could offer little resistance to these massive attacks. I must admit that I was already more than half convinced by the Tuscan proverb I have often quoted: The best remedy against malaria is a well filled pot. In confirmation, during the famine in Russia , 165 in 1921-3, an unimpeachable observer records that malaria broke out throughout the country and manifested the same symptoms as in tropical zones, even as far north as the Arctic circle. Undernourishment, on all the evidence, is a multiplying factor in the spread of diseases. There is another rule with no exceptions: epidemics jump from one human mass to another. Alonso Montecuccoli, sent to England by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, wrote (2 September 1603) that he would cross from Boulogne and not from Calais, where the English plague, following the trade route, had just arrived.166 This is but a small example in comparison with the powerful waves that began in China and India and brought the plague to the West, via the everactive relay points of Constantinople and Egypt. Tuberculosis was also an old scourge of Europe: Francis 1 1 (tubercular meningitis), Charles IX (pulmonary tuberculosis) and Louis x i i i (intestinal tuberculosis) all fell victim to it (1560, 1574, 1643). But a form of tuberculosis more virulent than the established variety arrived, probably from India, in the eighteenth century. It was to become the leading disease of Romantic Europe and of the nineteenth century as a whole. Cholera also came from India, where it existed in an endemic state. It became general in the Peninsula in 1817 and then burst its bounds and swelled to a violent and terrible pandemic that soon reached Europe. Another visitor, this time during the centuries actually covered by our study, was syphilis. Its origins are prehistoric, primitive skeletons having been found which bear its marks. There were known clinical cases before 1492. But syphilis reappeared after the discovery of pre-Columbian America: it was, people have said, the vengeance of the vanquished. Perhaps the most probable of the four or five theories supported by doctors today is the idea that the disease appeared or rather reappeared - as a result of sexual relations between the two races (the influence of the treponema pertenue on the treponema pallidum) .167 In any case, the terrifying character of syphilis was revealed in Barcelona from the time of the celebrations of Columbus return (1493), and it then spread rapidly. It was an epidemic, rapid and mortal illness. Within the space of four or five years