Moses: The Founder of Preventive Medicine

Abstract

CAPT. PERCIVAL WOOD is, of course, not the first to recognise Moses as the founder of preventive medicine, but he has marshalled his evidence in an interesting and compelling manner in the light of modern research. Thus he ascribes the third plague that smote the Egyptians, that of lice, as the indirect result of the first plague of fouled water-supply, remarking that it does not take long in a warm climate to become infested with lice when personal hygiene is neglected. The frogs, similarly, were driven on to the land by the fouling of the water, and the myriads of dead frogs tended to breed the flies of the fourth plague. The lice and the flies and the rain, together with the destruction of their crops by locusts and hail, would likewise tend to engender epidemic disease among the famine-stricken Egyptians, and hence the culminating plague of all, that of death (the selection of the firstborn in the narrative is a dramatic detail added by a later hand). Moses: The Founder of Preventive Medicine. By Capt. Percival Wood. (Biblical Studies.) Pp. xi + 116. (London: S.P.C.K.; New York: The Macmillan Co., 1920.) Price 4s. net.