The Black Death

There was general agreement also on the best kinds of preventive medicine. A fig or two with some rue and filberts taken before breakfast was a useful start to the day. Pills of aloes, myrrh and saffron were popular. One authority^{132} placed his confidence in ten-year-old treacle blended with some sixty elements, including chopped-up snakes, and mixed with good wine. Rhubarb and spikenard was a compound easier to manufacture and to swallow. Witchcraft joined herbalism in the works of Gentile of Foligno^{133} who recommended powdered emerald; a remedy so potent that, if a toad looked at it, its eyes would crack. Gentile also suggested etching on an amethyst the figure of a man bowing, girded with a serpent whose head he held in his right hand and whose tail in his left. To be fully operative the stone had first to be set in a gold ring.

Bleeding was generally held to be a useful preventive device; Ibn Khātimah,^{134} for instance, feeling that it could only be beneficial to lose up to eight pounds. Diet was important. Anything which quickly went bad in hot weather was to be avoided. So was fish from the infected waters of the sea. Meat should be roast rather than boiled. Eggs were authorized if eaten with vinegar^{135} but should never be taken hard-boiled.^{136} Anyone trying to follow the advice of every expert would have been sadly perplexed. Ibn Khātimah approved of fresh fruit and vegetables but no one else agreed. Gentile of Foligno recommended lettuce, the Faculty of Medicine at Paris forbade it. Ibn Khātimah had faith in egg plant, another expert deplored its use.

It was bad to sleep by day or directly after meals. Gentile believed that it was best to keep steady the heat of the liver by sleeping first on the right side and then on the left. To sleep on one’s back was disastrous since this would cause a stream of superfluities to descend on the palate and nostrils. From thence these would flow back to the brain and submerge the memory.

Bad drove out bad and a school of thought maintained that to imbibe foul odours was a useful if not infallible protection. According to John Colle: ‘Attendants who take care of latrines and those who serve in hospitals and other malodorous places are nearly all to be considered immune.’ It was not unknown for apprehensive citizens of a plague-struck city to spend hours each day crouched over a latrine absorbing with relish the foetid smells.

A tranquil mind was one of the surer armours against infection. Ideally one should retreat to Boccaccio’s enchanted glade, live beautifully, pass one’s time in dalliance and in practising the art of conversation. But dalliance should not be carried too far: sex, like wrath, heated the members and disturbed the equilibrium. One’s mind should be resolutely closed to the agonies of one’s fellow men; sadness cooled the body, dulled the intelligence and deadened the spirit.

It seems unlikely that the intelligent and enlightened men who worked out these preventive measures had any great faith in their efficacy. Essentially they were a morale-building exercise: the morale of the physician, in that they made him feel at least remotely in control of the situation, and of the patient, in that they offered a slight hope of escape from death. But if the doctors lacked confidence in their capacity to keep the plague at bay, still more did they doubt their ability to cure it once it had struck. They knew too well how few of the sick recovered. But this knowledge of their helplessness did not stop them putting forward a host of remedies.