century. And, among all the enlightened and advanced nations, the expectation of the individual for long survival is greater; since the appearance of uncheckable and epidemic disorders is less frequent, and the percentage of cures is greater.
Since the general establishment of the system of quarantine, and the requirement of an efficient sewage system in towns and large cities, and the enforcement of sanitary plumbing laws in houses, the death rate has enormously decreased. The Plague, cholera, typhus and yellow fever, diphtheria, typhoid, consumption, and other maladies are not now the awful menace to life they were of old. The Plague, which in the past centuries devastated Europe, handing over the populations of whole cities to death and destruction, has been banished further and further East, until now it makes no serious lodgment where the proper precautions have been taken.
The virulence of this disease may be realized from the following figures: In Toulon, France, in 1721, out of a population of 250,000, 87,659 persons died. In the city of Marseilles, the year previous, forty to sixty thousand were victims. London's great plague of 1665
