DISEASES OF THE JEWS (cliz-ez'e'z, jriz).
The most prevalent diseases of the East are cutaneous diseases, malignant fevers, dysentery and ophthalmia.
(1) Of the first of these the most remarkable are leprosy and elephantiasis. (See LEPROSY.) To the same class also belongs the singular dis ease called the mad d'Aleppo, which is confined to Aleppo, Bagdad, Aintab and the villages on the Segour and Kowick. It consists in an eruption of one or more small red tubercles, which give no uneasiness at first, but, after a few weeks, be come prurient, discharge a little moisture and sometimes ulcerate. Its duration is from a few months to a year. It does not affect the general health at all, and is only dreaded on account of the scars it leaves. Foreigners who have visited Aleppo have sometimes been affected by it several years after their return to their own country. It is a remarkable fact that dogs and cats arc like wise attacked by it (Russell's Nat. Hist. of Aleppo, ii:299). The Egyptians are subject to an eruption of red spots and pimples, which cause a troublesome smarting. The eruption returns every year toward the end of June or beginning of July, and is on that account attributed to the rising of the Nile (Volney, i :231).
(2) Malignant fevers are very frequent, and of this class is the great scourge of the East, the plague, which surpasses all others in virulence and contagiousness. (See PLAGUE.) (3) The Egyptian ophthalmia is prevalent throughout Egypt and Syria, and is the cause of blindness being so frequent in those countries. (See BLINDNESS.) (4) Of inflammatory diseases in general, Dr. Russell (supra) says that at Aleppo he has not found them more frequent, nor more rapid in their course, than in Great Britain. Epilepsy and diseases of the mind are commonly met with. Melancholy monomaniacs are regarded as sacred persons in Egypt, and are held in the highest veneration by all Mahometans (Prosper Alpinus, De Med. .-L•t71'l. p• 58).
(5) Diseases are not unfrequently alluded to in the Old Testament, but, as no description is given of them, except in one or two instances, it is for the most part impossible even to hazard a con jecture concerning their nature. The issue men tioned in Lev. xv•5 cannot refer to ronorrht•a virulenta, as has been supposed by Nlichaelis and I lebenstreit (Winer, s. v. Krankheiten); for the person who exposed himself to infection in the various ways mentioned was only unclean until the evening, which is far too short a time to allow of its being ascertained whether he had escaped contagion or not. Either, then, the law of puri fication had no reference whatever to the con tagiousness of the disease (which is hardly ad missible), or the disease alluded to was really not contagious.
(6) Joram's disease is probably referable to chronic dysentery, which sometimes occasions an exudation of fibrine from the inner coats of the intestines. The fluid fibrine thus exuded coagu lates into a continuous tubular membrane, of the same shape as the intestine itself, and as such is expelled. This form of the disease has been no ticed by Dr. Good under the name of dtarrhwa itibularis (Study of Med., i:287). A precisely sim ilar formation of false membranes, as they are termed, takes place in the windpipe in severe cases of croup.
(7) Hezekiali suffered, according to our version, from a boil. The term here used, shekh een', means, literally, inflammation; hut we have no means of identifying it with what we call boil. The same may be said of the plague of
boils and blains (see BLAINS), and of the names of diseases mentioned in the 28th chapter of Deuteronomy, such as pestilence, consumption, fever, botch of Egypt, itch, scab. The case of Job, in which the term translated boil also occurs, demands a separate notice. (See Jos.) (8) Nebuchadnezzar's disease was a species of melancholy monomania, called by authors zoan thropia, or more commonly, lycanthropia, because the transformation into a wolf was the most ordi nary illusion. Esquirol considers it to have origi nated in the ancient custom of sacrificing ani mals. But, whatever effect this practice might halm had at the time, the cases recorded are inde pendent of any such influence, and it really does not seem necessary to trace this particular halluci nation to a remote historical cause, when we re member that the imaginary transformations into inanimate objects, such as glass, butter, etc., which are of every day occurrence, are equally irrecon cilable with the natural instincts of the mind. The same author relates that a nobleman of the court of Louis XIV was in the habit of frequently putting his head out of a window, in order to satisfy the urgent desire he had to bark. Calmet informs us that the nuns of a German convent were transformed into cats and went mewing over the whole house at a fixed hour of the day (Esquirol, Maladies Mentales, i :522). Illustra tions of corresponding mental maladies might be furnished by the hundreds.
(9) Antiochus and Herod died, like Sylla, from phthiriasis, a disease which was well known to the ancients. Plutarch, in his Life of Sylla, men tions several names of persons who had died from it, amongst whom are Pherecydes the philosopher, Alcman the poet, and Mutius the lawyer. M. Alibert was consulted by a celebrated French academician, who complained that his' enemies even pursued him into the academy, and almost carried off his pen (Dermatoses, i :585). Nothing is known respecting the immediate causes of this malady, but there is no doubt that it depends on the general state of the constitution, and must not be attributed to uncleanliness. Alibert men tions the case of a person who, as soon as the parasitic animals had been destroyed, fell into a typhoid state, and shortly after died. The ques tion of alleged demoniacal possession, so often mentioned in the New Testament, has been con sidered under another head. (See DEMONIAC.) W. A. N.
DISH (dish), (Heb. say'fel, low), probably a shallow pan.
Various kinds of dishes are mentioned in Scrip ture, but it is impossible to form any other idea of their particular forms than may be suggested by those of ancient Egypt and of the modern East, which have much resemblance to each other. The sites of such ancient towns as were built of sun dried bricks are usually covered with broken pot sherds, some of them large enough to indicate the form of the entire vessel. These are remarkably similar to those in modern use, and are for the most part made of a rather coarse earthenware, covered, with a compact and strong glaze, with bright colors, mostly green, blue or yellow. Dishes and other vessels of copper, coarsely but thickly tinned, are now much used in the East, but how far this may have been anciently the case we have not the means of knowing. (see BASIN; CUP.)