ABSTRACT
The first great and solemn warning as to the necessity of Preventive Medicine fell like a thunderbolt upon England in the Black Death. The Black Death demonstrated the social effect of disease upon the nation. It was the first occasion in England, as formerly in the time of Justinian, when men realised how profoundly disease changes the destiny of nations. Famine-pestilences due to poor tillage and uncertain climate had periodically swept through the country, and the demands for nutritive foods had led in 1285 to our first importation of grain from Germany and Holland. The sixteenth century was an age of transition from darkness and superstition to the light of scientific knowledge. Its intellectual awakening arose from two mainsprings—first, the unveiling of the ancient literature and philosophy of the past, and secondly, the revelation of the known physical world as only part of an infinite universe.
