Excerpt from A Manual of Practical Hygiene, Vol. 2 Whoever considers carefully the record of the mediaeval epidemics, and seeks to interpret them by our present knowledge of the causes of disease, will surely become convinced that one great reason why those epidemics were so frequent and so fatal was the compression of the population in faulty habitations. Ill-contrived and closely packed houses, with narrow streets, often made winding for the purpose of defence; a very poor supply of water, and therefore a universal uncleanliness; a want of all appliances for the removal of excreta; a population of rude, careless, and gross habits, living often on innutritious food, and frequently exposed to famine from their imperfect system of tillage, - such were the conditions which almost throughout the whole of Europe enabled diseases to attain a range, and to display a virulence, of which we hare now scarcely a conception. The more these matters are examined, the more shall we be convinced that we must look, not to grand cosmical conditions; not to earthquakes, comets, or mysterious waves of an unseen and poisonous air; not to recondite epidemic constitutions, but to simple, familiar, and household conditions, to explain the spread and fatality of the mediaeval plagues. Section I. General Conditions of Health. The diseases arising from faulty habitations are in great measure, perhaps entirely, the diseases of impure air. The site may be in fauAbout the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."