Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/72

64 in these accounts, but, as Hirsch states, the bubonic plague takes at any rate a foremost place among the great epidemic diseases of those times.

The same author says: "There is only one of the epidemics of the plague in the middle ages that has arrested the attention of the chroniclers, poets, and physicians of those days; and that interest was awakened by the enormous diffusion that it reached over the whole of the then known world, by its victims reckoned in millions, and by the shock to the framework of society which it brought with it and left behind it. This disastrous pestilence, known everywhere under the name of black death, as one of the great events of the world's history, has fixed the attention of writers in a high degree, and has been thought worthy to be painted in minutest details and in the most vivid colors."

Several accounts of the plague of the fourteenth century have become classical. Among them I may mention that of Boccaccio, which begins as follows: "In the year, then, of the fruitful nativity of our Lord, 1348, there happened at Florence, the fairest city in all Italy, a most terrible plague; which, whether owing to the influence of the planets, or that it was sent from God as a just punishment for our sins, had broken out some years before in the Levant"; and concludes thus: "Between March and July following it is supposed, and made pretty certain, that upward of a hundred thousand souls perished in the city only; whereas, before that calamity, it was not supposed to have contained so many inhabitants. What.magnificent dwellings, what noble palaces were then depopulated to the last person! What families extinct! What riches and vast possessions left, and no known heir to inherit! What numbers of both sexes in the prime and vigor of youth, whom in the morning, neither Galen, Hippocrates, nor Æsculapius himself but would have declared in perfect health—after dining heartily with their friends here, have supped with their departed friends in the other world!"

This epidemic, like all others of the plague, spread from the East to the West. It prevailed in the Crimea in 1346, reached Constantinople in 1347, and, as we have seen by this quotation from Boccaccio, began its devastations in Florence in 1348, and by the beginning of 1350 it had spread all over the continent of Europe and the adjacent islands. Hecker places the number of deaths from this epidemic at no less than twenty-five millions, or about one fourth of the inhabitants of that part of the globe at the time. Hirsch believes that this estimate was not too high.

The history of the fifteenth century is dotted with notes of local epidemics, and at this time physicians begin to report more accurately and in greater detail the characteristic symptoms and the course of the disease. It was at this time that exanthematic