Demons of Illness and Poverty Stalking the Lucky Gods, by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1884. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Herbert R. Cole Collection.

Epidemic

Volume XIII, Number 3 | summer 2020

Miscellany

“There are observances necessary for a healthy man to employ during a pestilence,” advised the first-century Roman medical writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus, “although in spite of them, one cannot be secure.” Best of all is “to go abroad, take a voyage. When this cannot be, to be carried in a litter, walk in the open before the heat of the day, gently, and to be anointed in like manner.”

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.

—Agnes Repplier, 1929