No disease illustrates better the progressive evolution of scientific medicine.

It is one of the oldest of known diseases.

The Greeks and Graeco-Romans knew it well.
It seems highly probable, as brought out by the studies of W.H.S.

Jones of Cambridge, that, in part at least, the physical degeneration in Greece and Rome may have been due to the great increase of this disease.
Its clinical manifestations were well known and admirably described by the older writers.

In the seventeenth century, as I have already told you, the remarkable discovery was made that the bark of the cinchona tree was a specific.