6 DDT — Killer of Killers 



by the fall of the year. Shortly thereafter Germany and the 

 Netherlands felt the attack, and by the year 1350 this pesti- 

 lence had spread throughout all of Europe, even to the dis- 

 tant islands of Iceland and Greenland. 



When the cold, clammy fingers of the Black Death 

 touched a community, few inhabitants escaped. In many 

 towns and cities, more than half the population died. The 

 total number of deaths throughout Europe is hard to believe. 

 At last 25,000,000 people — one-fourth of the population of 

 Europe — were killed by this visitation of the plague, and 

 some authorities place the total deaths as high as three-fourths 

 of the whole population. 



But even this destruction of human life did not satisfy 

 the demon of the plague, for it returned again and again to 

 many parts of Europe over the next thirty years. In many 

 regions, one-third of the population was wiped out in 1359 

 and 1360; and many Polish towns lost one-half of their popu- 

 lations in 1360 and 1361. Ten years later, in 1370, Russia 

 was revisited by a severe wave of plague that killed 80,000 

 people in Lubeck alone. 



During the next two or three centuries, plague epidem- 

 ics broke out every once in a while, and although they were 

 not as severe as the Black Death itself, they would all be 

 classified as major calamities if they were to occur in 20th 

 century America. For example, it has been estimated that 

 in Paris alone bubonic plague killed 50,000 in 1418, 40,000 

 in 1450, and another 40,000 in 1467. Other cities fared 

 just as badly: there were 16,000 plague deaths in Florence in 

 1418; 40,000 in Constance in 1438; 30,000 in Venice in 

 1477 and 1478, and 18,000 in Vienna; while in Brussels, in 

 1502, as many as 500 a day lost their lives. 



Except for minor, localized epidemics, plague was rela- 



