. SCIF.XCF.S. 



'59 



were found to face the danger, and the priests alone ventured to approach the 

 dying, and offered them the last consolations of religion. 



Public sanitary measures do not date, however, from this period of 

 general calamity, but from a somewhat later epoch, when the outbreak of 

 various local epidemics caused great apprehension as to the return of the 

 black plague. The closing of houses, streets, and even quarters in towns 

 where the disease had raged, the drawing of a sanitary cordon round the 



Fig. 110. Portrait of Innocent IV., elected Pope in 1243. Fresco Painting upon Gold Ground, 



in the Basilica of St. Paul, Rome. 



places infected, and, what was still more important, the scientific investiga- 

 tion of the causes of the disease, the cleansing of the sewers and the streets, 

 the purifying of the drinking water, the transfer of the needy sick to some 

 place outside the walls, and the practice of burying the victims of epidemic 

 in quicklime, testify to the prudent precautions of the administration. The 

 paving of streets, which had been abandoned, or at all events much 

 neglected, since the fall of the Roman empire, was one of the logical 

 consequences of this system of general salubrity (Fig. 111). At this period, 



