The office was created for a man who had a special genius for this
form of study. It was delightful to himself, and he made it
delightful to others. He is regarded as the founder of historical
pathology. He studied disease in relation to the history of man,
made his study yield to men outside his own profession an
important chapter in the history of civilisation, and even took
into account physical phenomena upon the surface of the globe as
often affecting the movement and character of epidemics.
The account of "The Black Death" here translated by Dr. Babington
was Hecker's first important work of this kind. It was published
in 1832, and was followed in the same year by his account of "The
Dancing Mania." The books here given are the two that first gave
Hecker a wide reputation. Many other such treatises followed,
among them, in 1865, a treatise on the "Great Epidemics of the
Middle Ages." Besides his "History of Medicine," which, in its
second volume, reached into the fourteenth century, and all his
smaller treatises, Hecker wrote a large number of articles in
Encyclopaedias and Medical Journals. Professor J.F.K. Hecker was,
in a more interesting way, as busy as Professor A.
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