DISEASES OF THE JEWS. The most pre valent diseases of the East are cutaneous diseases, malignant fevers, dysentery, and ophthalmia. Of the first of these the most remarkable are leprosy and elephantiasis. [LEPROSY.] To the same class also belongs the singular disease called the mal d'Aleppo, which is confined to Aleppo, Bagdad, Aintab, and the villages on the Segour and Ko wick. It consists in an eruption of one or more small red tubercles, which give no uneasiness at first, but, after a few weeks, become prurient, dis charge 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 some times been affected by it several years after their return to their own country. It is a remarkable fact that dogs and cats are likewise 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 towards the end of June or beginning of July, and is on that account attributed to the rising of the Nile (Volney, i. 231). 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. [PLAGUE.] The Egyptian ophthalmia is prevalent throughout Egypt and Syria, and is the cause of blindness being so frequent in those countries. [BLINDNESS.] Of inflammatory diseases in gene ral, Dr. Russell (1. c.) 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 Mohammedans (Prosper Alpinus, De Med. "Egypt., p. 58).
Diseases are not unfrequently alluded to in the 0. T. ; 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 conjecture con cerning their nature. The issue mentioned in Lev. xv. 2 cannot refer to gonorrhoea virulenta, as has been supposed by Michaelis and Hebenstreit (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 purification had no reference whatever to the contagiousness of the disease (which is hardly admissible), or the disease alluded to was really not contagious. Jehoram'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 coagulates into a continuous tubular membrane, of the same shape as the intes tine itself, and as such is expelled. This form of
the disease has been noticed by Dr. Good under the name of diarrhoea tubularis (Study of Med. i. 237). A precisely similar formation of false mem branes, as they are termed, takes place in the wind pipe in severe cases of croup.
Hezekiah suffered, according to our from a boil. The term here used, Pro, means literally inflammation ; but we have no means of identifying it with what we call boil. The same may be said of the plague of boils and blains, and of the names of diseases mentioned in the 28th chapter of Deuteronomy, such as pestilence, con sumption, fever, botch of Egypt, itch, scab. The case of Job, in which the term translated boil also occurs, demands a separate notice. [Jon.] Nebu chadnezzar's disease was a species of melancholy monomania, called by authors zoanthropia, or more commonly lycanthropia, because the transforma tion into a wolf was the most ordinary illusion. Esquirol considers it to have originated in the an cient custom of sacrificing animals. But whatever effect this practice might have had at the time, the cases recorded are independent of any such influ ence ; and it really does not seem necessary to trace this particular hallucination to a remote his torical cause, when we remember that the ima ginary transformations into inanimate objects, such as glass, butter, etc., which are of every-day occur rence, are equally irreconcilable 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). Antiochus and Herod died, like Sylla, from phthiriasis, a disease which was well known to the ancients. Plutarch, in his Lift of Sylla, mentions 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 aca demician, who complained that his enemies even pursued him into the academy, and almost carried off his pen (Dernzatoses,i. 585). Nothing is known respecting the immediate causes of this malady ; but there is no doubt that it depends on the general slate of the constitution, and must not be attributed to uncleanliness. Alibert mentions the case of a person who, as soon as these animals had been destroyed, fell into a typhoid state, and shortly after died. The question of demoniacal possession, so often mentioned in the N. T., has been con sidered under another head [DEmoNtAcs], and need not be re-opened in this place [PHYSICIAN]. —W. A. N.