Diseases like typhoid fever, influenza and pulmonary consumption, scarlet fever, diphtheria, pneumonia, and la grippe, which now carry off so many most precious lives, would have long since ceased to scourge the world.
Still, there is one cause for satisfaction: the law governing the relation of theology to disease is now well before the world, and it is seen in the fact that, just in proportion as the world progressed from the sway of Hippocrates to that of the ages of faith, so it progressed in the frequency and severity of great pestilences; and that, on the other hand, just in proportion as the world has receded from that period when theology was all-pervading and all-controlling, plague after plague has disappeared, and those remaining have become less and less frequent and virulent.( 339) (339) For the charge of poisoning water and producing pestilence among the Greeks, see Grote, History of Greece, vol.vi, p.213.For a similar charge against the Jews in the Middle Ages, see various histories already cited; and for the great popular prejudice against water-carriers at Paris in recent times, see the larger recent French histories.
The recent history of hygiene in all countries shows a long series of victories, and these may well be studied in Great Britain and the United States.

In the former, though there had been many warnings from eminent physicians, and above all in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from men like Caius, Mead, and Pringle, the result was far short of what might have been gained; and it was only in the year 1838 that a systematic sanitary effort was begun in England by the public authorities.

The state of things at that time, though by comparison with the Middle Ages happy, was, by comparison with what has since been gained, fearful: the death rate among all classes was high, but among the poor it was ghastly.

Out of seventy-seven thousand paupers in London during the years 1837 and 1838, fourteen thousand were suffering from fever, and of these nearly six thousand from typhus.

In many other parts of the British Islands the sanitary condition was no better.