Down to the interference of Napoleon with that
kingdom, all sanitary efforts were looked upon as absurd if not
impious. The most sober accounts of travellers in the Spanish
Peninsula until a recent period are sometimes irresistibly comic
in their pictures of peoples insisting on maintaining
arrangements more filthy than any which would be permitted in
an American backwoods camp, while taking enormous pains to stop
pestilence by bell-ringings, processions, and new dresses bestowed
upon the local Madonnas; yet here, too, a healthful scepticism has
begun to work for good. The outbreaks of cholera in recent years
have done some little to bring in better sanitary measures.[[81]]
II. GRADUAL DECAY OF THEOLOGICAL VIEWS REGARDING SANITATION.
We have seen how powerful in various nations especially
obedient to theology were the forces working in opposition to the
evolution of hygiene, and we shall find this same opposition,
less effective, it is true, but still acting with great power, in
countries which had become somewhat emancipated from theological
control.
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