If, as I have found, depression often makes individuals more susceptible to various diseases, it is probably via a similar mechanism whereby the mental depression of a larger group of people promotes the onset and development of an epidemic. I mentioned three states that regulate susceptibility to epidemics: the physical, medical, and psychological states. The first two were not so bad among the Jews, at least not so much worse as to justify such a tremendous difference in the incidence of typhoid among the Jews and Aryans. So it was that third factor, sudden and severe malaise caused by exclusion and degradation, that in my opinion is the reason for the much greater incidence of typhoid among Jews since the outbreak of the war.
I do not know if there is someone who might write a “biography” of the typhus epidemic plaguing us, biographies being so fashionable in the literature of late. But it would be a rewarding task. If we were to personify this epidemic, I would say that it is perverse and vicious, that it is laughing out loud, mocks us, thrives in spite of, or rather thanks to [4] efforts aimed to eradicate it. If I ignore the powerful factor—hunger and high prices, which have spread frighteningly since April—the main contributors to such a rapid development of the epidemic are the decrees which were meant to . . . restrict and eliminate it. People are, I think, generally aware of the impact that was made on the development of the epidemic by the deportation of nearly 100 thousand Jews from the countryside to Warsaw, carried out in the name of saving the country from the plague. And it is no secret that if those Jews had remained at home, they would have presented less risk for their Aryan neighbours than they do now, when they are isolated by prison walls and the penalty of death. And actually, this was but one link in a chain otherwise known as restrictions against the Jews. Indeed, the very establishment of the closed district in Warsaw created a perfect vehicle for the outbreak, which yielded such a harvest after fertilisation with the arrival of refugees from the countryside in the early spring. The second factor which aimed to eradicate the epidemic, and which unfortunately became one of its allies, was the activity of the Disinfection Brigades. The ineffectiveness and futility of the Brigades, which was a well-known problem anyway, will be discussed later in more detail.
This pointless work, in addition to its many other negative features, by the mere fact of passivity in the face of epidemic was harmful and indeed conducive to the development of the latter. Just like the use of digitalis in the case
