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Epidemic   Listen
noun
Epidemic  n.  
1.
(Med.) An epidemic disease.
2.
Anything which takes possession of the minds of people as an epidemic does of their bodies; as, an epidemic of terror.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Epidemic" Quotes from Famous Books



... Belapur, to whose wooden slippers the members of the club were in the habit of doing worship, whilst his shrine was used as a sanctuary for sedition-mongers and a store-house for illicit weapons. "Political" dacoities were soon in vogue again, and in 1905 there was an epidemic of house-breaking in and around Kolhapur, which enriched the club with several thousands of rupees and a few arms. Seven members were finally arrested and some made full confessions. All of these except one were Brahmans and mostly quite well connected. But even ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... and his school is on the question as to the quarter from whence the epidemic of uniformity springs which threatens the free development of modern society. Mill points to the society in which we move; to those who are in front of us, to our contemporaries. I feel convinced that our real enemies are at our back, and that ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller

... well in school time; indeed, when there were other patients not too sick to share its luxuries, it proved rather a pleasant break in the routine of class-room and study-hall. In fact, a late epidemic of measles that filled every bed had been a "lark" beyond Brother Timothy's suppression. But the infirmary in vacation, with no chance for the pillow fights that had made the "measles" so hilarious, with no boy in the next bed to exchange ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman

... was in a desperate state. The two Balkan wars had drained her of some of her best soldiers. Twice the Austrians had invaded her kingdom in this war, and twice they had been driven out. Then came a dreadful epidemic of typhus fever which was the result of unhealthful conditions caused by the war. Now the little kingdom, attacked by the Germans and Austrians on two sides and by the Bulgarians on a third, was literally ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet

... In times of epidemic the specialists of Wu-ism, who act as seers, soothsayers and exorcists, engage in processions, stripped to the waist, dancing in a frantic, delirious state, covering themselves with blood by means of prick-balls, or with needles thrust through their tongues, or sitting or stretching themselves ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... mechanism of respiration diaphragmatic. A child of the proper age with catarrh and cough is thus on the very brink of whooping cough. A large proportion of such children will develop the disease for themselves upon casual provocation, all contagion and all epidemic influence apart." Therefore he does not think contagion plays the important part generally supposed, and the assumption of a specific morbid poison is in his opinion entirely gratuitous. As to treatment ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... introduced from the West Indies by the companions of Columbus. It spread with wonderful rapidity; all ranks of persons, from the Holy Father Leo X. to the beggar by the wayside, contracting the shameful disease. Many excused their misfortune by declaring that it was an epidemic proceeding from a certain malignity in the constitution of the air, but in truth its spread was due to a certain infirmity in the constitution of man—an infirmity which had not been removed by the spiritual guidance under ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... possessed by the natives, their primitive agriculture, their habitual disinclination to settled life and industry, their constant wars and the epidemic diseases which, even as early as the time of Jacques Cartier, worked havoc among them, must always have prevented the growth of a numerous population. The explorer might wander for days in the depths of the American forest without ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock

... which such doubts melt away like mists of the night. Thus, uneasy because undeveloped, erring because I had never known the necessary guidance, seeking, but almost despairing of enlightenment, I was a fit subject for any spiritual epidemic which seemed to offer me a cure ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... how I'm fixed; close onto two hundred men sick, and one doctor. The medical supplies are wholly inadequate. There's not castor oil enough on this boat to keep the men clean inside. I'm using my own drugs, but they won't last through an epidemic like this. I can't do much for Lieutenant Fanning. You can, though, if you'll give him the time. You can take better care of him right here than he could get in the hospital. We haven't ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather

... did so he continued slowly to expand in size and to deepen in colour until mortality seemed to drop from him. He ceased to be a man and became a phenomenon, a purple thing that journeyed towards some unutterable end, portentous as marching judgment, tragic as fate, searching as epidemic, and yet heavily painted and generally touched up by the brush of some humorous demon, such as lays about him in preparation for Christmas pantomime, sworn to provide the giants' faces and the ogres' heads ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... was totally gone, which happened in three or four days. He afterwards took steel and bitters; and continued very comfortably, without any return of his dropsy, until the 7th of April 1782, when he was seized with an epidemic cough, which was very frequent with us at that time. His swellings now returned very rapidly, with the greatest difficulty in breathing, and he died in a few days. Blisters and expectorating medicines were used ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering

... does not know whether it is infectious or only epidemic; and when he heard how the dear boy had been for days past at the Exhibition at the town-hall, and drinking lots of iced water on Saturday, he seemed to think it quite accounted for. He says there is no reason that in this good air he should not do very well; but, oh, Julius, ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... connected with variations in population appear, however, to contradict the principles that disastrous circumstances act as stimuli to fecundity. For example, the fact that the number of births suddenly increases after a war or an epidemic, in short when the population has been decimated by any calamity, is to be explained by the sudden increase in the relative food-supply on account of the diminution of the number of the people. In this case, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... undue longing for the forbidden fruit, and first begin to admire some artistic depravity, when it has elsewhere ceased to be fashionable. In particular ages certain mental maladies are so universally epidemic that a nation can never be secure from infection till it has been innoculated with it. With respect, however, to the fatal enlightenment of the last generation, the Spaniards it would appear have come off with the chicken-pox, while in ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... three weeks this continued, when our hearts were saddened, and our duties and cares greatly increased, by the breaking out of the measles among our Indians. This epidemic was caused, by the coming in to our country of some free-traders who had lately had the disease. They had been discharged from the hospital as cured; but in some way or other they had carried the germs of the disease so that going in and out of the wigwams they spread the contagion ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young

... has received the name of the reign of terror. The streets of Paris were streaming with innocent blood; Robespierre was glutting himself with murder; fear and rage were the passions that divided mankind, and their struggles produced on either side the likeness of some epidemic frenzy. Whatever else the government wanted, vigour to repel aggressions from without was displayed in abundance. Two armies immediately marched upon Toulon; and after a series of actions, in which the passes in the hills behind the town were forced, the place was ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... genus Mastomys; endemic in portions of West Africa; infection occurs through direct contact with or consumption of food contaminated by rodent urine or fecal matter containing virus particles; fatality rate can reach 50% in epidemic outbreaks. ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... again, wholeheartedly. "Poor Uncle John! He won't even allow grape juice or ginger ale in his house. They came because they were afraid little Clara might catch the measles. She's very delicate, and there's such an epidemic of measles among the children over in Dayton the schools had to be closed. Uncle John got so worried that last night he dreamed about it; and this morning he couldn't stand it any longer and packed them off over here, though he thinks its wicked to travel ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... of the metropolis were scarce sufficient to protect the House from one clamorous aspect of the new problem. The members went about Westminster with an odd, new sense of being beset. A good proportion of us kept up the pretence that the Vote for Women was an isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic madness that would presently pass. But it was manifest to any one who sought more than comfort in the matter that the streams of women and sympathisers and money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things than an idle fancy for the franchise. The existing laws and conventions of relationship ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... Creek, and the water receives about one week's nominal storage before flowing to the filters. An aerator is used before filtration during the summer, when algae are likely to develop in the reservoir. The filter was installed after an epidemic of typhoid which was apparently caused by an infection of the water supply. Normally, the water has been little contaminated, but the supply is subject to accidental contamination at any time, among other possible sources of infection ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy

... she "couldn't have rode," was because all the horses were sick. It was the singular epidemic of 1872. There were no cars, no teams; the queer sight was presented in a great city, of the driveways as clear as the sidewalks; of nobody needed to guard the crossings or unsnarl the "blocks;" of stillness ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... refused to join in the Indian plot. He had, in fact, warned the Governor of the impending catastrophe. The area across the Bay had also escaped the "foull distemper" that swept along the James plantations about this time. Mortality had been high from the epidemic that probably came from the newly arriving immigrants ...
— The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624 • Charles E. Hatch

... repeated; spoken in all dialects, and chaunted through all notes of the gamut, till the sound of it had grown a weariness rather than a pleasure. Sceptical sentimentality, view-hunting, love, friendship, suicide, and desperation, became the staple of literary ware; and though the epidemic, after a long course of years, subsided in Germany, it reappeared with various modifications in other countries, and everywhere abundant traces of its good and bad effects are still to be discerned. The fortune of /Berlichingen with the Iron Hand,/ though less sudden, was by no means ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... of the very best books by GM Fenn. It has a good steady pace, yet one is constantly wondering how some dreadful situation is to be got out of. The hero is young Tom, whose father had been a doctor who had died in some recent epidemic, which had also carried off his mother. Tom has been taken into the house and law business of an uncle, but he does not seem to be getting on well there. Another uncle visits, and takes Tom back with him, giving him a much pleasanter and more ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn

... number of robberies of safes that have taken place in London during the last few weeks it is possible that an effort will shortly be made to do away with these cumbersome articles in order to stamp out the epidemic. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various

... valuable on the question of food supplied at Occoquan. Miss Dock is Secretary of the American Federation of Nurses. She has had a distinguished career in her profession. She assisted in the work after the Johnstown flood and during the yellow fever epidemic in Florida. During the Spanish war she organized the Red Cross work with Clara Barton. 'I really thought,' said Miss Dock, when I last saw her, 'that I could eat everything, but here I have hard work choking down enough food to keep the ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... individual that composed it had, it seemed, foreseen exactly what was going to happen, and had predicted it in language that could only have been wilfully mistaken by persons interested in proving that the speaker was not a prophet. Exceptional insight had been epidemic. The only wonder was (to the individual speaker) that Mrs. Nightingale had remained single so long, and the only other wonder was that none of the other cases had seen it. They had evidently only ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... Southern city, where she lived in great retirement for a year, doing good to all poor and suffering people, and spending the larger part of her fortune in charity. Early in the second year there was an epidemic of yellow fever: Mrs. Long refused to leave the city, and went as fearlessly as the physicians to visit and nurse the worst cases. But after the epidemic had passed by, she herself was taken ill, and died suddenly in a hospital ward, ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson

... July did the bulk of the Spanish force appear. During this time, the French, insufficiently equipped from the first, owing to the haste of their departure, were consuming provisions and water, not to speak of wasting pleasant summer weather. Their ships also were ravaged by an epidemic fever. Upon the junction, d'Orvilliers found that the Spaniards had not been furnished with the French system of signals, although by the treaty the French admiral was to be in chief command. The rectification of this oversight caused further delay, ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan

... pavements. In a camp you have the simplest form of dealing with these matters. The water supply is limited. Waste water and liquid ejection are absorbed by the ground; but a camp unprovided with latrines would always be in a state of danger from epidemic disease. One of the most frequent causes of an unhealthy condition of the air of a camp in former times has been either neglecting to provide latrines, so that the ground outside the camp becomes covered with filth, or constructing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various

... Sometimes he was called upon to do very hard work, sometimes very unpleasant or dangerous work; but if he answered the call of duty and met an actual human need, his service had to receive recognition. An example of such work was found in his conduct in the course of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. Knowing that fever in general was not quite as severe in its ravages upon Negroes as upon white people, the daily papers of Philadelphia called upon the colored people in the town to come forward and assist with the sick. The Negroes consented, and Absalom ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... old man," Macauley cried, sudden conviction seizing him, "you're working altogether too hard. This miserable city epidemic has done you out. I've thought all the time you were trying ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond

... observed that, man being an imitative animal and bishops being regarded by many as good examples, there seemed to him a serious danger of an epidemic of what he might call Brobdingnagitis. Fortunately the results would not be immediately apparent, otherwise he would be compelled to raise his tariff for cheap suits. A rise of six inches in the average height of his customers would throw out all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various

... study could he ever hope to master their infinite variety. His favorite mother cat kept closely at his side when he worked, or perhaps in his lap; while her kittens ran over him as fearlessly as they played with their mother's tail. When a terrible epidemic broke out among the cats of Berne in 1809, he hid his Minette safely from the police, but he never quite recovered from the horror of the massacre of the eight hundred that had to be sacrificed for the general safety of the people. He died ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow

... brilliant year of the imperial regime, at the apogee of the much boasted administration, which in reality was so hollow. The Chouans had sown such disorganisation in the West, that the authorities of all grades found themselves powerless to struggle against this ever-recurring epidemic. Count Caffarelli, prefet of Calvados, in his desire to retain his office, treated the refractories with an indolence bordering on complicity, and continued to send Fouche the most optimistic reports of the excellent temper ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre

... effects of ordinary diet. Irritability, the direct consequence of exhausting stimuli, would yield to the power of natural and tranquil impulses. He will no longer pine under the lethargy of ennui, that unconquerable weariness of life, more to be dreaded than death itself. He will escape the epidemic madness, which broods over its own injurious notions of the Deity, and 'realizes the hell that priests and beldams feign.' Every man forms, as it were, his god from his own character; to the divinity of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... will find that murder, approved and acknowledged, is not an epidemic peculiar to any time, or any country, or any opinion. We need not include hot-blooded nations of the South in order to define it as one characteristic of modern Monarchy. You may trace it in the ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... "And a second epidemic of the same nature had broken out a little before the period to which I have brought ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald

... tobacco-juice over the floor by teacher and pupils abating somewhat as she proceeded. Two miles farther on she stopped at the Chilton home for a talk to half a dozen assembled mothers on the nursing and prevention of typhoid, of which there had been a severe epidemic along Clinch ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman

... had begun to make love to Jane almost before I was off my knees to Mary, and, therefore, I had not been much hurt in Mary's case. I had suffered merely a touch of the general epidemic, not the lingering, chronic disease ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major

... socks. You're standing in a draught, Albert; close that window. You heard that man in the train about the epidemic of colds that is starting all over the country. O my God! I'm just so upset. And now that it has happened everything is so different. I could tear out my tongue for what I want to say and I can't say anything—not ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... are said to owe their origin to the following circumstances: In the eighth year of Numa's reign an epidemic raged throughout Italy, and afflicted the city of Rome. Now amidst the general distress it is related that a brazen shield fell from heaven into the hands of Numa. Upon this the king made an inspired speech, which ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch

... strolling along the deck, who hadn't been touched by the epidemic of seasickness, stopped to peer in at the porthole. They had mischief in their eyes, and as they caught sight of Slim's humorously pathetic countenance, one of them muttered in a low but distinct voice: "How'd you like to ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll

... interior part of the brain, and so giving rise to a derangement of the nervous system as a necessary consequence. This train of symptoms constitutes mainly, if not wholly, the essence of an occasional epidemic not unlike some forms of influenza or epizootic disease, and the bite of a rabid animal is not always, to an animal so bitten, the exciting cause of the disease, but merely an accidental concomitant in the prevailing disorder. Also ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... the prevalence of a dangerous epidemic disease in southern Russia known as the "plague," and its extremely virulent and contagious character, as manifested in the late outbreak, leaves no doubt that it is similar to, if not identical with, the "plague" which devastated the Old World ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson

... little gray. The epidemic had burthened him with responsibilities too multifarious and ponderous for his slender strength to bear. The continual nervous strain of abnormally protracted duty, the perpetual interruption of sleep, had almost prostrated even his will. Now he only hoped that, during ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn

... very fond of venison and seal meat, and for variety's sake welcome dog meat. A few years ago a disease carried off several of the dogs at Fort Chimo and every carcass was eaten. One old fellow, in fact, as Mathewson related to me, ate nothing else during that time, and when the epidemic was over bemoaned the fact that no more ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace

... never committed unless a person is drunk and angered by some slight or by jealousy. At one time there was a veritable epidemic of suicides among the Indians near Guachochic, the men hanging themselves with their girdles; one of them even suspended himself by the feet. But it is doubtful whether a pagan ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... from the great number of the very sick and helpless men brought to the hospital in the winter of 1864-5; and the illness of these threw a double duty upon those who were fortunate enough to escape the epidemic. To the honor of these ladies, it should be said that not one of them shrank from doing her full proportion of the work, and nearly all who survived, remained to the close of the war. For twenty months, Miss ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... epidemic appears, especially toward spring, devastating society, thinning the ranks of bachelordom, and leaving mothers lamenting for their fairest daughters. That spring the disease broke out with great violence in the Shaw circle, causing paternal heads much bewilderment, as one ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott

... example, the fate of those Vandals who conquered the north of Africa. They were a German tribe, blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, from somewhere in the Elbe country. Suddenly they, too, were seized with the strange wandering madness which was epidemic at the time. Away they went on the line of least resistance, which is always from north to south and from east to west. South-west was the course of the Vandals—a course which must have been continued through pure love of adventure, since in the thousands of miles ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... due channel; and, at length recovering and uniting their better resolutions, now that they see already how open and unbounded the insolence and rage is of our common enemies, to stay these ruinous proceedings, justly and timely fearing to what a precipice of destruction the deluge of this epidemic madness would hurry us, through the general defection of ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... In diagnosing an epidemic, it is not enough that we should be content with the symptoms; wisdom and the protection of the community demand that we should seek and eradicate the cause. Both wealth and poverty spring from the same ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... in the winter apartment, coughing and coughing, when overhearing (Li Wan's) answer, she lost control over her temper. "Have I got such a dreadful epidemic," she said, "that she fears that I shall bring it upon others? I'll clear off at once from this place; for mind you don't get any headaches and hot heads during ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... for a moment. Let us next inquire what is the rank of our critics. Public taste, I believe, as far as it is the encourager and supporter of art has been the same in all ages,—a fitful and vacillating current of vague impression, perpetually liable to change, subject to epidemic desires, and agitated by infectious passion, the slave of fashion, and the fool of fancy, but yet always distinguishing with singular clearsightedness, between that which is best and that which is worst of the particular class of food which its morbid appetite may call for; ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... the Republican party, which was opposed to the extension of slavery, was elected President of the United States. Forty-one days later, the legislature of South Carolina, determined to perpetuate slavery, met at Columbia, but, on account of a local epidemic, moved to Charleston. There, about noon, December 20th, it unanimously declared "that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved." Soon other slave states followed ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister

... so heavy and continuous in the wet season as in many other tropical climates. The country had for a long time a reputation for extreme salubrity. Since the small-pox in 1819, which attacked chiefly the Indians, no serious epidemic had visited the province. We were agreeably surprised to find no danger from exposure to the night air or residence in the low swampy lands. A few English residents, who had been established here for twenty or thirty ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... beyond, seemed suddenly to weary of virtue and turn eagerly to vice. It grew rutty and rough-tempered, and just because misfortunes never come singly, every creature we met took it into its head to regard us with horror. Fear of us spread like an epidemic through the animal kingdom of the neighbourhood. A horse drawing a wagon-load of earth turned tail, broke his harness as if it had been of cobweb instead of old rope, and sprang lightly as a gazelle with all four feet into another wagon just ahead. A donkey, ambling gently along the road, suddenly ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... and man, are necessary for any kind of intercourse, even that of business. Men can do nothing with each other, if they have not a certain minimum of trust. There have been times when there seems to be almost an epidemic of faithlessness, when the social bond seems loosened, when men's hands are raised against each other, when confidence is paralyzed, and people ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black

... the death of our soldiers the more deeply felt and bitterly lamented," returned his wife. "Merciful God! Tempestuous weather, an epidemic, fierce and treacherous enemies around them, and hunger! Who would not lose heart ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various

... of an epidemic consequent upon the hurried burial of so many dead under the pavement of ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy

... dead or dying chestnut trees. Stump sprouts of the Merribrooke variety survived for grafting purposes, and I have now kept the variety going by patient grafting ever since, on new stocks, hoping to carry the variety along until this epidemic of blight runs out ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various

... sound of a bell in the streets, looking out of the window and seeing an open cart—full of dead bodies—stopping before the door of a house, from which one more dead body was added to the funeral pile. That was the year of the great cholera epidemic. And again, I remember hearing bells early, very early, in the morning. We knew what that was. It was the donkey-man coming round to sell the donkeys' milk at the front door, quite warm ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon

... was becoming contagious. I am glad, Maude, that you were wise and kept the epidemic out of ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin

... excitement of the chase, from vagabondism to war, sometimes indolent and at other times turbulent, but under all circumstances, irregular and unreliable. In this case, lacteal activity is greater than lymphatic, as his nomadic life indicates. Nevertheless, he manifests a morbid sensibility to epidemic diseases, especially those which engender nutritive disorders and corrupt the blood. Figs. 84 and 85 represent the brain of an American Indian, and that of a European, and show the remarkable difference in their anatomical configuration. Evidently it is a race-distinction. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... they do to-day; nor were there then wanting, more than now, wretches that profited by them, to gather money or satisfy bad instincts, without being able to dispose of a single, miserable sheet of paper. On every side delators sprang up, and an epidemic of slanders embittered Rome; every man who had name or wealth or some relation with the family of Augustus, ran the risk of being accused as a lover of Julia. Several youths of high society, frightened by these charges, committed suicide; others were condemned. About Julia ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero

... walking near Belgrave Square yesterday. As usual, she was parfaitement mise. Was sorry for her sake, but glad for my own, to hear her sneeze twice, for she is considered to have easily the most musical sneeze in London. Talk of sneezing, during the 'flu epidemic Madame Fallalerie has been giving a course of lessons, "How to sneeze prettily" (twenty guineas the course), and her reception-rooms in Bond Street have been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various

... a previous number, furnished a brief sketch of the phenomena, purely physical, which characterized the epidemic of St. Medard, it remains to notice those of a mental ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... when Anthony had been remonstrating with Juliet for incurring so much danger while visiting the poor during a period of epidemic sickness, she replied, with her ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie

... Augusta,—The embarrassments you mention in your last letter I never heard of before, but that disease is epidemic in our family. Neither have I been apprised of any of the changes at which you hint, indeed how should I? On the borders of the Black Sea, we heard only of the Russians. So you have much to tell, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... on the plantation. Each death from cholera was reported,—the change in Marston's feelings observed and provided against,—every stage of the crop carefully watched. Graspum, however, had secured himself in the real estate, and gave little heed to the epidemic that was carrying off the negro property. Finally, to pass over several stages in the decline of Marston's affairs, the ravages of the disease continued until but forty-three negroes, old and young, were left ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... much for his father-in-law. Mr. Spragg had come to Apex as a poor boy, and their early married life had been a protracted struggle, darkened by domestic affliction. Two of their three children had died of typhoid in the epidemic which devastated Apex before the new water-works were built; and this calamity, by causing Mr. Spragg to resolve that thereafter Apex should drink pure water, had led directly to the founding of ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... Arnold, Mrs. Surratt and Dr. Samuel Mudd, a physician, who set Booth's leg, which was sprained by his fall from the stage box. Of these Herold, Atzerodt, Payne and Mrs. Surratt were hanged. Dr. Mudd was deported to the Dry Tortugas. While there an epidemic of yellow fever broke out and he rendered such good service that he was granted a pardon and died a number ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure

... daughter Thomasine, Nov. 1st. There were two of the family of Carrot, two Lincolns, two Applebys, two Grogbys, three Hawards, two Burches, besides other single cases. Though it is not so specified, this would doubtless be the epidemic called “the ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... known by this name is situated in a remote part of London, near the Thames. It is notoriously infested by the most desperate and degraded set of wretches in the whole metropolitan population, and it is so thickly inhabited that it is hardly ever completely free from epidemic disease. In this horrible place, and among these dangerous people, Julian is now employing himself from morning to night. None of his old friends ever see him. Since he joined the Mission he has not even called ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins

... in as many days, killing off my villains like flies, and creating a perfect epidemic of hastily made matches among titled heroes and virtuous nursery governesses. Scarcely an aristocratic house in England that wouldn't shake to its foundations if fiction were fact; but then my fiction isn't of the kind that anything short of a dislocated universe ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... out to be a trained nurse to an epidemic of love-making, she is in great danger of doing something foolish her own self. I am even glad it is prayer-meeting night for Mr. Haley; he is safe in performing his rituals. He might ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess

... him; while if you removed him by means of the garrot, the knife or the poisoned glass, no matter how discreetly the deed was done the hangman was pretty sure to get you sooner or later. But the gang—it was as safe as an epidemic! The fact was not lost upon the community. People in almost every station of life appreciated it at its true worth, and, encouraged by the example of the Admiralty, availed themselves of the gang ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson

... thousandth part of an inch the right direction. People talk as though things in this world were at loose ends. Cholera sweeps across Marseilles and Madrid and Palermo, and we watch anxiously. Will the epidemic sweep Europe and America? People say, "That will entirely depend on whether inoculation is a successful experiment; that will depend entirely on quarantine regulations; that will depend on the early or late appearance of frost; ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... wife. "It is all well, Bishop, he died well. I know you did all you could, it is all well." He trembled all over, and his face was wet with tears; but he seemed strangely drawn to us, and if he survives this present epidemic, his son's death may be to him the means in God's hands of an eternal life. Most touching, is it not, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... greatly disturbed by this fresh accident. He could not get a fresh horse in the desert, and if an epidemic was going to seize their steeds, they would be seriously ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... only had he dressed my father's wound when it was inflicted, but he had gone, like him, to Genoa, where, as long as my father lived, he had come several times a day to care for him: if the doctors charged with the duty of fighting the typhus epidemic had been as assiduous and zealous as Fournier, my father, perhaps, would not have died. I had often thought this, so I gave the warmest of welcomes to Fournier, whom I did not at first recognise in the pelisse of ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... and a Russian will glance through the article about the cells and reel off an essay about it to the Syeverny Vyestnik. The Vyestnik Evropi will criticize the essay, and for three years there will be in Russia an epidemic of nonsense which will give money and popularity to blockheads and do nothing but irritate ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... pacifying the revolted Netherlands. The incidents and intrigues of this task rather belong to the history of the Low Countries than to the story of our hero. In the midst of them, worn out by too ardent a spirit, or stricken by an epidemic, Don John expired, in his camp near Namur, at the early age of thirty-two, on October 1, 1578. The task of saving a part of the revolted provinces to the Spanish crown, he left to the strong arm and genius of ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... understands its sacredness more than I do. I merely say that there may be times when a man, having stood a great deal and thought it over calmly, is justified in taking the law into his own hands—always supposing he can do it decently, quietly, and without scandal. The epidemic of waits broke out early in December, and every other night or so these torments came in the still hours and burst into song beneath my windows. They made me nervous. I was more wretched on the nights they did not come than on ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie

... decomposition of dead vegetable matter is the cause of the intermittent fevers that prevail in all parts of the peninsula, where the yellow fever, under a mild form generally, is also endemic. When it appears, as this year, in an epidemic form, the natives themselves enjoy no immunity from its ravages, and fall victims to it as well ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon

... sewerage epidemic took possession of the town, and became an insane contagion. Meetings were held at various places to discuss the matter, and at last the government agent allowed the court house to be used gratis for that purpose. Of course our hero and two other victims ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... Scotch! He afterwards died of the plague, of which visitation one-half of the whole people of the city, 200,000 in number, were carried off. I took it into my pleasant head that the plague might be providential or epidemic, but was not contagious, and therefore I determined that it should not alter my habits in any one respect. I hired a donkey, and saw all that was to be seen in the city in the way of public buildings—one handsome mosque, which ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

... also much assisted by their superiority in the arts of civil life. At their first preaching in Sussex, that country was reduced to the greatest distress from a drought, which had continued for three years. The barbarous inhabitants, destitute of any means to alleviate the famine, in an epidemic transport of despair frequently united forty and fifty in a body, and joining their hands, precipitated themselves from the cliffs, and were either drowned or dashed to pieces on the rocks. Though a maritime people, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... have an epidemic of labor-saving devices. The principal arguments used by the manufacturer of a labor-saving device is, "It makes money and saves work." Making money and getting soft snaps seem to be the objectives ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter

... awful bad out at the hospital now," went on Quin. "A fellow was telling me yesterday that in some of the wards they only have one nurse to two hundred patients. The epidemic is getting worse every day. You-all in town here don't know what it's like where there's so many sick and so few to take ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... conquests; and in the fifth and sixth crusades, the same causes, almost on the same ground, were productive of similar calamities. [96] After a ruinous delay, which introduced into the camp the seeds of an epidemic disease, the Franks advanced from the sea-coast towards the capital of Egypt, and strove to surmount the unseasonable inundation of the Nile, which opposed their progress. Under the eye of their intrepid monarch, the barons ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... to be "the swagger thing." "Ah!" Master TOMMY sighed, as he set off for school with only five shillings in his pocket, in consequence of all his dearest—and nearest—relatives being laid up with the prevailing epidemic, "Ah, how I should like to be one of those cigarettes, and then I should be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various

... start a musical school; he had three pupils, only two of which paid a sou; on the third, Cinette, he built many projects. He was making arrangements to transport his pupil to a wider stage, when an epidemic broke out in the village, and the girl was left alone in ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina

... "HOME AFFAIRS.—The epidemic of fraud unchecked. Embezzlement of half a million in New York.—Misappropriation of a trust fund by executors. Orphans left penniless.—Clever system of thefts by a bank teller; $50,000 gone.—The coal barons decide to advance the price of coal and reduce ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... he accused himself. You worked for those who set off the bombs and tested and tested while the cycle went up and up beyond human tolerance—not the death level, but the level where nothing was sure again, the level that made cancer a thing of epidemic proportions, replacing statistically all of the insane multitude of things that man could do to kill himself. Even the good things that the atom had brought were destroyed in the panic that ensued. No ...
— Now We Are Three • Joe L. Hensley

... caused her some uneasiness. When Mrs. T. A. Buck wore blue serge, an epidemic of blue serge broke out in the workroom. Did Emma's spring hat flaunt flowers, the elevators, at closing time, looked like gardens abloom. If she appeared on Monday morning in severely tailored white-linen ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber

... It had gained in grace and vigor, but she was seldom seen wooing the serious and lonely orange around which Milly had acquired the skill that Mildred now enjoyed. On the contrary, she initiated an epidemic of frivolity on the ice in the shape of waltzing and ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... intent upon glorious achievements, a knight-errant. The ridicule among us runs strong against laudable actions; nay, in the ordinary course of things, and the common regards of life, negligence of the public is an epidemic vice. The brewer in his excise, the merchant in his customs, and, for aught we know, the soldier in his muster-rolls, think never the worse of themselves for being guilty of their respective frauds towards the public. This evil is come ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... this morning,” observed Case. “We’ve had an epidemic here; and Captain Randall takes gin for ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Sometimes this epidemic assumes unmistakably morbid attributes.[81] In proportion as it extends and in proportion as the struggle is prolonged, the fighting rage becomes a positive frenzy. The very same ant, which at the outset was timid, will now be affected with a paroxysm of furious madness. She no longer knows ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... LOVE. In our first home—a country parish in Surrey—three precious children were born to us—Griselda, Irene and little Launcelot. Scarlet fever and diphtheria broke out in the village, a terrible epidemic, causing grief and anxiety in many homes. We were almost worn out with helping our poor people—nursing, consoling, encouraging. Then, just as the epidemic appeared to be abating, it reached our ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham

... TO INOCULATION, VACCINATION, AND THE USE OF ANAESTHETICS. Theological opposition to inoculation in Europe In America Theological opposition to vaccination Recent hostility to vaccination in England In Canada, during the smallpox epidemic Theological opposition to the use of cocaine To the use of quinine Theological opposition to the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... time an epidemic of "flu" broke out in some of the villages. In view of the Russian custom of keeping the doors and windows of their houses practically sealed during the winter and with their utter disregard for the most simple sanitary ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore



Words linked to "Epidemic" :   epidemic roseola, epiphytotic, ecdemic, medicine, plaguey, medical specialty, epidemic meningitis, pandemic, epidemic myalgia, epidemic hysertia, eruption, epidemic parotitis, endemic, epidemic pleurodynia, epidemic encephalitis, epidemic disease, epidemic cholera, pestiferous, pestilential



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