The Black Death and The Dancing Mania | Page 3

a terrible
contagion far and near; for even the vicinity of those who had fallen ill
of plague was certain death; so that parents abandoned their infected
children, and all the ties of kindred were dissolved. After this period,
buboes in the axilla and in the groin, and inflammatory boils all over
the body, made their appearance; but it was not until seven months

afterwards that some patients recovered with matured buboes, as in the
ordinary milder form of plague.
Such is the report of the courageous Guy de Chauliac, who vindicated
the honour of medicine, by bidding defiance to danger; boldly and
constantly assisting the affected, and disdaining the excuse of his
colleagues, who held the Arabian notion, that medical aid was
unavailing, and that the contagion justified flight. He saw the plague
twice in Avignon, first in the year 1348, from January to August, and
then twelve years later, in the autumn, when it returned from Germany,
and for nine months spread general distress and terror. The first time it
raged chiefly among the poor, but in the year 1360, more among the
higher classes. It now also destroyed a great many children, whom it
had formerly spared, and but few women.
The like was seen in Egypt. Here also inflammation of the lungs was
predominant, and destroyed quickly and infallibly, with burning heat
and expectoration of blood. Here too the breath of the sick spread a
deadly contagion, and human aid was as vain as it was destructive to
those who approached the infected.
Boccacio, who was an eye-witness of its incredible fatality in Florence,
the seat of the revival of science, gives a more lively description of the
attack of the disease than his non-medical contemporaries.
It commenced here, not as in the East, with bleeding at the nose, a sure
sign of inevitable death; but there took place at the beginning, both in
men and women, tumours in the groin and in the axilla, varying in
circumference up to the size of an apple or an egg, and called by the
people, pest-boils (gavoccioli). Then there appeared similar tumours
indiscriminately over all parts of the body, and black or blue spots
came out on the arms or thighs, or on other parts, either single and large,
or small and thickly studded. These spots proved equally fatal with the
pest-boils, which had been from the first regarded as a sure sign of
death. No power of medicine brought relief--almost all died within the
first three days, some sooner, some later, after the appearance of these
signs, and for the most part entirely without fever or other symptoms.
The plague spread itself with the greater fury, as it communicated from

the sick to the healthy, like fire among dry and oily fuel, and even
contact with the clothes and other articles which had been used by the
infected, seemed to induce the disease. As it advanced, not only men,
but animals fell sick and shortly expired, if they had touched things
belonging to the diseased or dead. Thus Boccacio himself saw two hogs
on the rags of a person who had died of plague, after staggering about
for a short time, fall down dead as if they had taken poison. In other
places multitudes of dogs, cats, fowls, and other animals, fell victims to
the contagion; and it is to be presumed that other epizootes among
animals likewise took place, although the ignorant writers of the
fourteenth century are silent on this point.
In Germany there was a repetition in every respect of the same
phenomena. The infallible signs of the oriental bubo-plague with its
inevitable contagion were found there as everywhere else; but the
mortality was not nearly so great as in the other parts of Europe. The
accounts do not all make mention of the spitting of blood, the
diagnostic symptom of this fatal pestilence; we are not, however,
thence to conclude that there was any considerable mitigation or
modification of the disease, for we must not only take into account the
defectiveness of the chronicles, but that isolated testimonies are often
contradicted by many others. Thus the chronicles of Strasburg, which
only take notice of boils and glandular swellings in the axillae and
groins, are opposed by another account, according to which the mortal
spitting of blood was met with in Germany; but this again is rendered
suspicious, as the narrator postpones the death of those who were thus
affected, to the sixth, and (even the) eighth day, whereas, no other
author sanctions so long a course of the disease; and even in Strasburg,
where a mitigation of the plague may, with most probability, be
assumed since the year 1349, only 16,000 people were carried off, the
generality expired by the third or fourth day. In