ABSTRACT
The affliction of the Clasomenian, the tenth and accurately described case in the First Book of Hippocrates' Epidemics, cited as typhus by Ozanam, appears to us more like a case of typhoid fever than one of typhus. When the rash, together with fever and headache, delirium and extreme weakness, typhus is easily recognized; isolated endemic cases—may be so slight and transient that often it is not noticed at all by the physician unfamiliar with the disease. Certainty that typhus existed in the fifteenth century and later is made possible largely by its epidemic occurrence. Typhus is an acute fever which does not always behave in a conventional manner. As in the other Rickettsia diseases, the virus of both varieties of typhus is transmitted to man by insects. The body and the head louse carry the infection from one human being to another.
