TYPHUS FEVER 95 



gested; delirium, followed by stupor deepening into coma; parotid 

 abscesses in some, the eruption appearing about the seventh day and 

 the disease continuing from fourteen to twenty days. Castro says 

 that this disease was known to the French as "La Pourpre;" to the 

 Italians as "Petecchie ;" to the Spaniards as "Tabardillo," and to the 

 Germans as "Fleckfieber." 



During the sixteenth century typhus fever was so prevalent in the 

 jails of England that the disease spread among the court officers when 

 prisoners were brought before them for trial. This happened 

 repeatedly and gave to court sessions the designation of "black assizes." 

 The first of these of which record is left occurred at Cambridge in the 

 thirteenth year of the reign of Henry VIII (1522). The justices, 

 bailiffs, gentlemen and other persons in court were seized with a fever 

 which proved fatal to many. The most notable report of a "black 

 assize" is that at Oxford in the twentieth year of the reign of Elizabeth 

 (1577). The prisoner was Rowland Jenks, a bookbinder and a Roman 

 Catholic, who was charged with treason and profanity of the protes- 

 tant religion. He was sentenced to lose his ears. The trial was held 

 at Oxford Castle, July 4. Several prisoners were brought into court 

 in the couurse of the trial. The chronicle states that "an infectious 

 damp of breath" spread through the room. "Above six hundred sick- 

 ened in one night; and the day after, the infectious air being carried 

 into the next village sickened there more than an hundred more." By 

 the twelfth of August 510 persons perished. "The infection arose 

 from the nasty and pestilential smell of the prisoners when they came 

 out of the jail, two or three of whom had died a few days before the 

 assize began." The disease was marked by loss of appetite, headache, 

 sleeplessness, loss of memory, deafness and delirium, so that the vic- 

 tims behaved like madmen, The Catholics saw in this the scourge of 

 God for the unjust punishment, and the Protestants attributed it to 

 the "diabolical machinations of the Papists." 



During the thirty years war (1619-1648) the whole of central 

 Europe was desolated by war, famine and pestilence. The nature of 

 the epidemic is plainly shown by both medical and lay writers and its 

 ravages were portrayed in both prose and poetry. One verse of a song 

 runs as follows: 



