64 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



eluded in these accounts, but, as Hirsch states, the bubonic plague 

 takes at any rate a foremost place among the great epidemic dis- 

 eases 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 mil- 

 lions, 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 na- 

 tivity 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 follow- 

 ing it is supposed, and made pretty certain, that upward of a 

 hundred thousand souls perished in the city only ; whereas, be- 

 fore 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 ex- 

 tinct ! 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 

 ^Esculapius 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 Con- 

 stantinople 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 



