Plague and pestilence in literature and art

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY
HUMPHREY MILFORD M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY

FRONTISPIECE
S. SEBASTIAN. BY SODOMA
PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE IN LITERATURE AND ART
BY RAYMOND CRAWFURD
M.A., M.D. OXON., F.R.C.P. FELLOW OF KING’S COLLEGE, LONDON
OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1914
This volume represents substantially the FitzPatrick Lectures which I had the privilege of delivering at the Royal College of Physicians in 1912. Originally I intended to do no more than gather together into a succinct record the various memorials and reminders of Pestilence that I had met with in my wanderings at home and abroad and in my casual incursions into general literature. Insensibly the desire to understand supplanted the desire merely to record, and the desire to explain superseded the endeavour to understand. I have turned my attention, as far as practicable, only to the literary and artistic associations of Pestilence, but these have inevitably overlapped the confines of history and of medical science. The latter territory has been invaded only so far as was necessary to ensure a correct orientation to the inquiry. I have thought it wise to let the curtain fall at the end of the eighteenth century, leaving it to my readers to decide what vestiges of the mentality of distant centuries have survived into this twentieth. A little reflection on this will afford a most salutary lesson to all of us.