Note 17 — THE GREAT EPIDEMICS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

Satirical writers would not have failed to have spoken of the marks left by small-pox. Such authors as Martial, who frequented the public baths in order to write up the physical infirmities of his fellow-townsmen, to the end of divulging their deformities in biting epigram, would only have been too happy to have mocked the faces of contemporaries marked by the cicatrices of small-pox.