Excerpt from Civilization and Health Strange as it may seem, we have no positive proof of the origin Of a single new serious disease since the dawn of recorded history. At least seventy per cent Of all our serious diseases were well known to the Greeks and probably to the Egyptians. And the probability is that nearly half the remainder were also in existence then, though Bright's Disease, for instance, was only clearly recognized and traced to its anatomical cause, the kidney, some eighty years ago by Dr. Richard Bright, of Guy's Hospital, London, whose name it now bears. It had certainly existed for centuries, and prob ably for thousands of years before that. Obviously, any statement as to its being more or less common in the nineteenth century than, say, the fourteenth, can be nothing better than the merest guess. 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.