ENDEMIC (Gr. among the people), a name often applied to diseases which attack the inhabitants of a particular district or country, and have their origin in some local cause, as the physical character of the place where they prevail, or in the employments, hab its and mode of living of the people. Every part of the world, every climate and every country has its peculiar endemics. Thus the tropical and warm climates are subject to peculiar cutaneous disorders, eruptions of various kinds, because the constant heat keeps up a strong action of the skin. In northern climates eruptions of the skin occur, but they are of a different kind. Thus in all the north polar countries, in Nor way, a kind of leprosy, the radesyge, is preva lent, arising from the coldness and humidity of the climate, which dispose the skin to such dis orders. Hot and moist countries generate the most • violent typhoid and putrid fevers; the West Indies and some of the South American coasts, for instance, produce the yellow fever. In different parts of the United States inter mittent fevers, arising from local malarial con ditions, are common, as they are in countries generally in places that are damp and not warm, on marshes and large rivers, etc. Places in a more dry and elevated situation, northern coun tries particularly, are peculiarly subject to in flammatory disorders. In countries and districts very much exposed to currents of wind, espe cially in mountainous places, we find at all seasons of the year rheumatism, catarrhs and the whole train of complaints which have their origin in a sudden stoppage of the functions of the skin. In large and populous towns we meet
with the most numerous Instances of pulmonary consumption. In cold and damp countries like England, Sweden and Holland the most frequent cases of croup occur.
Diseases which are endemic in one country may also appear in others and become epidemic if the weather and other physical influences re semble those which are the causes of the en demic in the former place; the climate being for a time transferred, as it were, from one to the other. Endemic disorders in some circumstances become contagious, and thereby spread to other persons, and may be transplanted to other plzces, the situation and circumstances of which predispose them to receive these disorders.. This is known by the migrations of diseases., the spreading of leprosy from Oriental countries to Europe, and the like.
It is favorable to the cure of obstinate dis orders for the invalid to remove to a climate where his particular complaint is rare. Thus it is customary for people attacked with pulmonary complaints to remove to localities where the air is pure and dry and sunshine abundant. So it is of advantage to the consumptive to ex change unwholesome city air for pure air in the country. Modern sanitation is learning to deal with conditions which, alike in populous and sparsely peopled places, have hitherto bred dis eases; so that immunity from fatal disorders may- be said to show the good results of sanitary science, as do also the improved statistics of longevity.