Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

82 FROM FETICH TO HYGIENE. I
II. GRADUAL DECAY OF THEOLOGICAL VIEWS REGARDING
SANITATION.
We have seen how powerful in various nations especiall}'^
obedient to theology were the forces working in oppositioi
to the evolution of hygiene, and we shall find this same 0|
position, less effective, it is true, but still acting with great
in countries which had become somewhat emancij
power,
pated from theological control. In England, during th<
mediaeval period, persecutions of Jews were occasionally re
sorted to, and here and there we hear of persecutions of
witches ; but, as torture was rarely used in England, there
were, from those charged with producing plague, few of those
torture-born confessions which in other countries gave rise
to widespread cruelties. Down to the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries the filthiness in the ordinary mode of life in
conceive : ferment-
England was such as we can now hardly
ing organic material was allowed to accumulate and become
a part of the earthen floors of rural dwellings; and this un-
doubtedly developed the germs of many diseases. In his
noted letter to the physician of Cardinal Wolsey, Erasmus
describes the filth thus incorporated into the floors of English
houses, and, what is of far more importance, he shows
an inkling of the true cause of the wasting diseases of the
"
period. He If I
says, entered into a chamber which had
been uninhabited for months, I was immediately seized with
a fever." He ascribed the fearful plague of the sweating
sickness to this cause. So, too, the noted Dr. Caius advised
sanitary precautions against the plague, and in after-genera-
tions. Mead, Pringle, and others urged them ; but the pre-
vailing thought was too strong, and little was done. Even
the floor of the presence chamber of Queen Elizabeth in
Greenwich Palace was "covered with hay, after the English
fashion," as one of the chroniclers tells us.
In the seventeenth century, aid in these great scourges
was mainl}' sought in special church services. The foremost
English churchmen during that century being greatly giver
to study of the early fathers of the Church ; the theologica
theory of disease, so dear to the fathers, still held sway, anc