Excerpt from The Plague of Lust, Vol. 1 of 2: Being a History of Venereal Disease in Classical Antiquity TO Historical Students and Medical Specialists alike it is Of the highest value and interest, and in many respects an indispensable addition to their Library. The Object the Writer proposed to himself was a History of Venereal Disease, to trace its existence, symptoms and incidence, from the earliest notices of its occurrence recorded in Literature onwards. This ambitious programme he has only partially carried out in the present Work, which forms Part I. Of the projected Treatise as a whole, and deals with the Disease under its various forms and successive manifestations throughout Antiquity. In it he devotes his efforts to proving, and we think with conclusive success, - the existence, denied by so many, of the dread Disease in different shapes in Europe, Asia and Africa long before the Christian era, and all through the period of Classical Antiquity, scouting utterly the popular theory of its first intro duction at the end of the Fifteenth and beginning of the Sixteenth Centuries from America. About 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.