Motley Talk about the Plague
What killed up to 200 million people in medieval Europe in four years?
Dear Motley Friends, during the Covid Pandemic my thoughts turned to previous pandemics, and especially the treatments given at the time. I am re-publishing the article again here.
The Plague of Justinian
This bubonic plague (the same disease as the Black Death) started in 541 CE, during the reign of the Emperor Justinian1. The plague was carried by fleas living on rats, which got onto grain ships that travelled throughout the Byzantine Empire. 25 million people died, half the population of Europe at the time. The outbreak persisted for roughly the next two centuries, with the last outbreak reported in 750 CE.
Treatments included cold-water baths, carrying magic amulets & rings, and covering oneself with material that had been blessed by a saint (where did they find saints?) or a hermit. Also carrying flowers all day. They did have drugs, powerful alkaloids like the atropine found in mandrake and belladonna, also opium poppy juice and purgatives.
The Black Death
The bubonic plague was present somewhere in Europe every year between 1346 and 1671 (325 years). The Black Death was the deadliest pandemic so far recorded in human history, resulting in the deaths of up to 200 million people between 1347 and 1351.
Treatments included the medical advice to ‘leave quickly, go far and come back slowly’. This is when quarantine (the Italian word for a 40-day period) started. Treatments included rubbing onions, herbs or a chopped-up snake (if available) on the boils or cutting up a pigeon and rubbing it over an infected body. Also drinking vinegar, eating crushed minerals, arsenic, mercury or ten-year-old treacle. There was even a proposal to float a ship of peeled onions down the Thames, to counter the evil odours thought to cause plague.
The Great Plague of London
In the summer of 1665 bubonic plague returned to London with a vengeance. By the end of the year, the ‘Great Plague’ was estimated to have killed almost 69,000 people, although the true figure was probably nearer 100,000 - almost a quarter of London’s population.
Treatments for plague were not much better by 1665. They included writing the letters 'abracadabra' in a triangle, using a lucky hare's foot, dried toad, leeches, and pressing a plucked chicken against the plague-sores until the chicken died. People carried pomanders filled with sweet smelling herbs, and wore lucky charms. There were rules & orders to try to prevent the plague spreading.
That no swine, dogs, cats or tame pigeons be permitted to pass up and down in streets or from house to house in places infected.
That each City & Town should provide a pesthouse.
That Searchers & Examiners will search anyone who is thought to be infected. If they show signs of infection, they should be moved to the Pesthouse.
[Or] the house the infected person lived in should be shut up for 40 days, including the other occupants of the house, and have a Red Cross and ‘Lord Have Mercy Upon Us’ written on the door. Warders should provide necessaries [presumably food].
After 40 days, the house should be fumigated, washed and painted with lime. No clothes or household stuff should be removed from the house for another 3 months2.
The warders were often not good at providing necessities and sometimes, when the door was unlocked all within were dead, some from plague and some from starvation. Not surprisingly people were reluctant to report infections.
“I having stayed in the city till above 7400 died in one week, and of them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day or night but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lombard Street, and not meet twenty persons from one end to the other … till whole families (ten and twelve together) have been swept away … till the nights (though much lengthened) are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that died the day before.” Samuel Pepys, in a letter to Lady Carteret, September 1665.
Many people left London and the plague spread throughout England. The plague was transported to Eyam, a small village in Derbyshire, by fleas in a package of cloth. The villagers decided to isolate, to prevent plague spreading throughout the district. 260 villagers died of the plague (75% of the villagers).3
The plague, the second Dutch war, and the Great Fire of London made 1666 an even worse year for Londoners4. However, the fire did kill all the rats and led to an end of that plague outbreak.
These are just three among many plague outbreaks in the past. Bubonic plague has never really gone away; from 2010 to 2015 there were 3248 cases reported worldwide, although antibiotics are usually an effective treatment nowadays.
In the 1950s London was still rebuilding after the damage caused in World War II. My father was a medical student and he was required to have a skeleton for his studies. Luckily my grandfather was a London bobby (policeman) and one day he was cycling past a huge bomb crater that had exposed a London plague burial pit (there were too many dead for individual burials). My grandfather asked the men who were excavating the pit if he could have one of the skeletons. He was told he could, and he took it home. It never occurred to me to ask how my grandfather took the skeleton home.
They called the skeleton George. He had a hole in the back of his skull. My father thought that when George showed plague symptoms they killed him, to stop the plague spreading.
My father still lived at home and when a girlfriend came to stay, she slept in the spare room with George. In the morning the family waited to see how the girl had coped, especially since, as George dried out, his teeth became unstable and would drop out during the night; plop, plop .. plop plop .. plop, onto the floor. My mother was unfazed (she was a nurse) and reader, he married her (they divorced five years later).
As always, any links are provided to give the reader more information. I do not make any money from these links. Where possible permissions have been sought for the use of images and text, unless they are in the Public Domain. If there is an issue with copyright, please contact me. I am an amateur historian covering a wide range of subjects. I do careful research using secondary sources (books, articles, videos and a little bit of Wikipedia). If there are any mistakes I apologise, and please let me know.
Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe by William Rosen. ‘In the middle of the sixth century, the world's smallest organism collided with the world's mightiest empire. With the death of twenty-five million people’.
I summarised and rewrote the orders in modern English.
Eyam: Plague Village by David Paul. The story “follows the local rector, the Revd William Mompesson, as he tries to support his parishioners and contain the disease. Basing his account closely on the known facts, David Paul describes the events during this time in the village’s history from the perspectives of the rector, his wife Catherine, and the fictional character of Beth Hounsfeild, Catherine’s cousin”.
1666: Plague, War and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal is an excellent book about 1666. “Shedding light on these dramatic events, historian Rebecca Rideal reveals an unprecedented period of terror and triumph. Based on original archival research and drawing on little-known sources, 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire takes readers on a thrilling journey through a crucial turning point in English history, as seen through the eyes of an extraordinary cast of historical characters”.