Sanitation, quarantine and the watchfulness of the public health service have so relieved the modern world from fear of major epidemics or concern about them that we have forgotten what they did through the long centuries to war-cursed humanity. In this small volume is compressed the story of the invincible microbe, which even now competes with high explo sives in the war-stricken Orient for its victims.
The book is a historical review of the world's great epidemics from both the medical and the historical point of view. The skill of generals, the valor of soldiers and the wealth of the Indies avail nothing when typhus, pest, malaria, dysentery, yellow fever and cholera enter the field. Every army left behind it a train of the invincibles, who ravaged the cities and countryside without respect to victory or defeat. Their victims often outnumbered those of the sword, and the slaughter continued long