The old school hypothesis and the deductions therefrom would seem therefore, to be this: That a super-malignant contagium imported from some foreign source falls upon organisms predisposed to infection by mental stress or physical privation and over-strain or both combined; and the contagion thus generated through the medium of some unsuspected "carrier" seizes upon and sweeps through that portion of the community so predisposed, in the form of a great, general epidemic with a maximum of mortality. At later intervals the same repeats itself with less violence and reduced mortality, because a great proportion,--representing the sufferers in the original epidemic,--being now thereby immune, the onus falls upon that section of the younger generation unprotected by individual resistant force who consequently become the chief sufferers--as in the case of the present epidemic, the pandemic form of which is obviously due to the fact that equal conditions of unrest, privation and distress prevail universally throughout the entire nerve plains of the Planet.
The first recorded outbreak in America occurred in the year 1647, followed by a second in 1655 and again in 1789 and 1807. In these the mortality appears to have been confined, after the first outbreak, to a few mere modest thousands whereas in the present visitation a conservative estimate places the figures of the horrible world-holocaust at no less a sum than 18 _million lives_ in all.[D] The ravages in America have been appalling including many of the medical profession.
We pass on then to the second item--the question of the germ.
The illusive germ has come to be regarded by the layman with reserve--nay more--with suspicion. The part of the bacteriologist has been somewhat overdone. The conditions of popular credence are not what they were. A great change has awakened the masses of the people and a new intelligence is born which now discerns that disease is one great Unity just as the body is one inseparable interdependent whole--that _the cause of disease is in the blood_ and dependent upon its nourishment and moreover, that the _physical forces of the body can be exhausted as much by mental strain,--causing the too rapid burning up of nerve fat (lecithin),--as by excessive physical exertion_. For example. Mental disturbance--grief, worry, excitement--produce immediate physical effect in headache, palpitations and the like. Physical exhaustion--privation, hunger and over-work--on the other hand produce mental depression and collapse. The inevitable law of compensation rules.