the present century an exemption which, being so obviously due to the improved sanitary and hygienic conditions of the modern European cities and towns, is a forcible illustration of how largely the power of curtailing the propagation and progress of the scourge is within the means of human control. There can be little, if any, doubt that the same total absence of drainage, and the very possible consequent contamination of drinking water, added to the narrowness of the streets, the overcrowded and badly ventilated state of the houses themselves, and the dirty habits of the inmates, which are also characteristic of those quarters of eastern cities and towns in which plague is always more or less occasionally prevalent, obtained in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, amongst European communities.
We learn, on the authority of Mr Marshall (who gets his figures from the weekly bills of mortality of the period), that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries London was seldom free from the pestilence, and that in several years, not usually regarded by historians as plague epochs, it annually slew from less than 1000 to 4000 of the inhabitants.
Between the years 1593 and 1665, five severe outbreaks of the disease occurred in London, and the number of deaths for the respective years were as follows:—1593, 11,503; 1603, 36,269; 1625, 35,417; 1636, 10,400; 1665, 68,596. According to Sir William Petty, the average mortality during these several attacks amounted to about a fifth of the population.
That insanitary surroundings and the spread of plague, whilst sanitary ones and its decline, follow each other like cause and effect, may be emphasised by the statement of two facts:—1. The medical commissioner lately sent by the Russian government to the seat of the late outbreak of the malady in Astrakan, discovered the people dirty in their habits, living in noisome, overcrowded houses, and the atmosphere polluted with the smell of decaying fish, added to which the village was most miserably drained. 2. Ranken records that in Rajpootana plague propagated by the filthy habits of the inhabitants was for some years almost entirely obliterated by the adoption of sanitary precautions.
It may here be noticed that the Astrakan plague was associated with inflammation of the lungs, a feature which led an eminent Russian physician to adopt the opinion, that the Astrakan malady is the same as the Indian plague, which is believed to be the same disease which, under the name of ‘The Black Death,’ committed such appalling devastation in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in the fourteenth century.
In his ‘Epidemics of the Middle Ages,’[111] Hecker has told of the ravages of this ruthless pestilence, which made its appearance in
Europe in 1348. Its devastations at Florence have been very powerfully described by Boccaccio in the introduction to his ‘Decameron.’ Boccaccio was in Naples at the time it was devastating Italy, therefore, it is conjectured, his graphic description must have been derived from hearsay and the reports of eyewitnesses.
[111] Published by the Sydenham Society, 1844.
In August of the same year it broke out at Dorset, from which county it soon reached Devon and Somerset, and thence rapidly spread throughout England, slaying its thousands in its progress. In London alone it has been estimated that the mortality caused by it amounted to a hundred thousand.
Hecker assumes that in Europe its victims were twenty-five millions. These however, as well as the following figures, must only be received as approximations to the correct numbers, which, owing to the absence of any contemporary bills of mortality, cannot but be very imperfect:—