The Black Death

It is curious that, though every doctor paid lip-service to the teachings of Galen, the relatively prosaic explanation of the corruption of the atmosphere which he had advanced several hundred years before was almost ignored by commentators on the Black Death. Infection, he propounded, arose mainly from ‘Inspiration of air infected with a putrid exhalation. The beginning of the putrescence may be a multitude of unburned corpses, as may happen in war; or the exhalations of marshes and ponds in the summer…’ Perhaps the monstrous dimensions of the disaster which overtook Europe in the fourteenth century forced its victims to seek some proportionately monstrous explanation.

But the idea that the disease might be passed directly from man to man was not ruled out by belief in a corrupted atmosphere. A few, mainly among the Arabs, rejected the possibility of infection on religious grounds but for most people the evidence of their own eyes was too strong. Some effort was made to establish a link between the two theories, as by those who argued that a victim of the plague might radiate infection in his immediate vicinity by generating a form of personal and highly localized miasma which he carried, like a halo, around his head.^{29} But such refinements of logic were not much considered and, in general, people were content to note that the disease could pass from victim to victim with terrifying speed and did not worry too much about the philosophical or scientific basis for such a phenomenon. The evidence was overwhelming. It is noteworthy that it was an Arab, Ibn al Khatīb, who defied his religion’s teaching and stated flatly: ‘The existence of infection is firmly established by experience, research, mental perception, autopsy and authentic knowledge of fact…’

It does indeed appear that, to the medieval mind, the speed with which the Black Death passed from man to man was its most alarming feature. ‘The contagious nature of the disease,’ wrote one chronicler,^{30} ‘is indeed the most terrible of all the terrors, for when anyone who is infected by it dies, all who see him in his sickness, or visit him, or do any business with him, or even carry him to the grave, quickly follow him thither, and there is no known means of protection.’

Boccaccio was particularly struck by the perils of infection:

Moreover, the virulence of the pest was the greater by reason that intercourse was apt to convey it from the sick to the whole, just as fire devours things dry or greasy when they are brought close to it. Nay, the evil went yet further, for not merely by speech or association with the sick was the malady communicated to the healthy with consequent peril of common death, but any that touched the clothes of the sick or aught else that had been touched or used by them, seemed thereby to contract the disease.

Boccaccio himself claims to have seen a couple of pigs in the street digging their snouts into the rags of a poor man who had just died. They smelt them, tossed them to and fro between their teeth, then almost immediately ran round and round, and, without more ado, tumbled dead to the ground. The inevitable result of this well-founded if somewhat exaggerated terror of infection was that the victims of the plague more often than not found themselves abandoned to their fate and even those who had endured some slight brush with the disease were likely to be shunned by their fellow-men. Security lay only in total isolation. If this were impracticable then at least contact with the plague-struck should be avoided.