The Black Death

Fourteenth-century men seem to have regarded their doctor in rather the same way as twentieth-century men are apt to regard their priest, with tolerance for someone who was doing his best and the respect due to a man of learning but also with a nagging and uncomfortable conviction that he was largely irrelevant to the real and urgent problems of their lives. They were, of course, ready to believe almost anything which was told them with authority but their faith had been undermined by the patent lack of confidence on the part of the doctors themselves. Sometimes, under intolerable stress, scepticism would give way to something more primitive and violent, tolerance would crack and the doctor find himself execrated as the architect of the disease which he had proved so signally ill-qualified to check. But such moments of revulsion were rare and in general the doctor preserved a privileged position. Chaucer’s mockery and the occasional abuse of an aggrieved patient was the worst that he had to bear.

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However little use the doctors may have been, the average Parisian at least had the comfort of knowing that he was far better provided with medical attention than his contemporaries. There were more doctors, predominantly Jewish, in Paris than in any other city of Europe and all surgeons had passed an examination and had been licensed by a panel of master surgeons trained at the Châtelet.^{139} The fashionable course for study was based on the works of the Arab surgeon Razi and an ointment called ‘Blanc de Razès’ was on sale at apothecaries as a cure recommended for virtually any ailment. But no amount of ointments nor the wisdom of the august Faculty of Medicine itself could do much to help the Parisian when the Black Death broke about him.

It seems that the first authenticated cases of plague in the capital were noted in May or June 1348, though the full force of the epidemic was not felt until several months later. It did not die out until the winter of 1349. The chronicler of St Denis put the death roll at about fifty thousand,^{140} a surprisingly conservative estimate for a city that may well have had more than two hundred thousand inhabitants.^{141} Certainly there is no reason to think the figure exaggerated. An analysis based on church warden accounts for the parish of St Germain l’Auxerrois showed that seventy-eight legacies were bequeathed to the church between Easter 1340 and 11 June 1348.^{142} In the next nine months the number rose to four hundred and nineteen – a rate forty times as high. ‘It seems,’ commented Mollat, ‘that the plague sent men to their lawyers as fast as to their confessors.’ On this, admittedly somewhat slender basis, he calculated that the plague was at its worst almost at the end, in September and October 1349, and that it ran an unusually protracted course. The Bishop, Foulque de Chanac, died in July 1349; the Duchess of Normandy, Bonne de Luxembourg, in October and her mother-in-law, Jeanne de Bourgogne, when the danger must have seemed almost over, on 12 December.

‘There was,’ wrote the best-known chronicler of the Black Death in Paris, ‘so great a mortality among people of both sexes, of the young rather than of the old, that it was hardly possible to bury them.’^{143} This is not the only reference to the plague striking the young rather than the old, the strong before the weak. Statistically, as will be seen more clearly in the case of England,^{144} there seems no reason to credit such a theory. The position is, of course, complicated by the tendency of the old to die from other causes without a major epidemic to speed them on their way, but, even after allowing for this, the young and fit, as was to be expected, proved the more likely to resist the disease. The death of a strong young man is naturally more shocking and more likely to be remembered: to this, perhaps, is due the conviction on the part of certain chroniclers that his chances of death were unfairly high.