Historians of the plague—Sketch of the four chief pestilences recorded—Origin of the disease—Plague of Athens—Of Constantinople—Of Florence—Of Milan—State of medical knowledge—Plague of London.
A history of the plague, in the hands of one qualified to do justice to the subject by medical knowledge joined to extensive research, might be rendered attractive in no common degree. It has chanced that the phenomena, moral and physical, of several remarkable pestilences have been described by writers of unusual power, whose eloquence has communicated to them a literary interest, independent of that which they must otherwise have possessed as striking passages in the history of man. Of these Thucydides is the earliest; and the plague which desolated Athens in the second year of the Peloponnesian war, though not the earliest mentioned in profane records, is the first of which any particular account has reached us. A sufferer as well as a spectator, he has related its symptoms, described the wretchedness which it inflicted on his country, and analyzed its moral effects with the accuracy and profoundness of reflection by which he is distinguished above all other historians; and no part of that work which he has delivered to us as an “everlasting possession”[91] has excited more admiration than this. Hippocrates, himself a contemporary, if not an eye-witness, has left a medical account of the same disease, and from these authorities Lucretius has composed one of the finest and most celebrated passages in his philosophical poem.[92] Procopius also has left a description of the plague[93] which during the reign of Justinian ravaged nearly all the known world, evidently modelled upon Thucydides, and not an unsuccessful imitation of him. In later times the great plagues of Florence and London have found worthy chroniclers in the two great novelists, Boccaccio, who was an eye-witness of that which he describes, and Defoe, the verisimilitude of whose narration is such, that it is difficult to believe it anything but what it proposes to be, the narrative of a person who had witnessed the eventful time of which he wrote. Defoe, however, was under three years old when the great plague of London broke out. Boccaccio appears, like Procopius, to have written in imitation, perhaps in emulation, of the Greek historian: Defoe has treated the subject in his peculiar style, and at much greater length than any of those whom we have named; and intermixing, as we must believe, a quantity of facts and observations, the result of minute inquiry, with a framework of fiction, has produced a narrative stamped, like all his works, with a singular appearance of reality, and remarkable for simple pathos and homely vigour of description.
We may divide pestilences into two classes: those which, as if dependent upon some noxious property of the air, have spread successively from country to country and devastated a large portion of the world, and those which have raged in a particular spot or within small limits, and which appear therefore to have been generated by some local accident, as is said to have occurred in Africa, b.c. 126 (A.U. 628), by the fetid exhalations from dead locusts,[94] or to have been introduced from other places, and to have been propagated rather by infection than the transmissive qualities of the air. To ascertain the specific difference between the two is probably beyond the reach of medical science; but the distinction is important, since the latter are susceptible of control by quarantine laws, which are powerless, perhaps worse than powerless, to arrest the former. Of these the most celebrated are quaintly described in a manuscript account of the great plague of London, preserved in the British Museum.[95]
“Of universall, or œcumenicall[96] plauges, the most spreading and destructive that I have met with in history are these four: ffirst that of Athens, which fell out in the Peloponnesian warr, before Christ 428, described most fully by that eminent historian, Thucydides, in his second booke, who had been sicke of it himselfe, but restored, and from him by that great promoter and enlightener of the Epicurean, or Corpuscular Philosophy, the poet Lucretius, in the last part of his last booke. This plauge, though it bee vulgarly called the Athenian plauge, because it did great execution there in that city, yet indeed not on Athens alone, but as Thucydides tells us, beginning at Æthiopia overran Afrika and transferred itself into Asia, and thence into Europe.
“The second famous, or œcumenicall plauge which hath occurred to my reading, was in the raigne of Vibius Gallus, and Volusianus his sonne, according to Calvisius, of Christ 253. This plauge is also related to have had its originall in Æthiopia, and from thense to have diffused itself into all the provinces of the Roman empire, and to have lasted fifteen yeares without intermission. How it raged in Alexandria and Ægypt wee understand from an epistle of Dionysius, the bishop of that city at that time, recorded by Eusebius in his viith book, cap. 22. Hee tells us it fell promiscuously on the heathens and the Christians, though most heavily upon the former, that noe house was free from the dire effects of its rage. From other parts of Affrique wee understand from St. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, in his excellent sermon de Mortalitate, made on purpose to animate and strengthen the Christians, who were joynt and fellow sufferers with the heathens, unde præsentis mortalitatis copia, as he tearms it—‘the large measure of the present mortality:’ and of its rage at Rome wee find observed out of the Roman history by Calvisius that there dyed of it daily to the number of 5000, and therefore Brightman and Mead, both men sufficiently learned, in their comentaryes upon the Revelations, interpret this plauge to be one of the fearful judgments foretold to breake forth upon the opening of the fourth scale, chap. vi. 8. And Justus Lipsius, a critick of noe ordinary reading, saith of this pestilence in his book de Constantia, lib. 2, ‘non alia unquam major lues, &c.’ that his reading did not afford him an example or president of a greater plauge, considering the many countreys it infected in the severall yeares that it lasted.
“The third universall plauge was that which happened in the raigne of Justinian, and took its beginning in the yeare of Christ 532, and this also, as the former, is sayd to have descended from Æthiopia. Wee have a copious description of it by Procopius in his Persicorum, lib. 2. And we are informed by him that it raged very much in Byzantium, or Constantinople, for four months space, and that when it was in its height, there dyed of it every day 10,000 and upwards; and this is the pestilence related by Evagrius the ecclesiasticall historian, which lasted, as he says, fifty-two yeares, not continuall, but by severall returns and revolutions, and of this pestilence he was sick himselfe. And Greece shared not only in the contagion of it, but also Italy, as wee read in Paulus Diaconus, and it swept away Pope Pelagius, the predecessor of Gregory the Great, about the year 580; ffor I conceive this plauge to be that in the raigne of Justinian, propagated into remoter countreys, and lengthened out to this tearme, much according to the forementioned computation of Evagrius. It also overran Fraunce in the year 583, and this I conceive to be that which plauged the Britons here in that vacation betwixt the Romans government and the Saxons, in Vortigern’s tyme, when the living could scarce bury the dead.
“The fourth œcumenicall plauge which I have taken notice of, was in the year 1347, ‘quæ violentissima fuit, et totum mundum pervasit in annis sex et ita vastavit ut nec tertia pars hominum superesset:’ they are the words of Calvisius, ‘it was most violent and ran over the world in six years, and soe wasted Europe that not the third part of men were left alive.’ To omit other parts, and see what it did at home in our owne countreye, Mr. Cambden reports in his Britannia, that in the yeare 1348 this plauge was soe hot that in Wallingford, in Barkshire, it dyspeopled the town, reducing their twelve churches to one or two, which they now retayne. In London it had soe quick an edge, that in the space of twelve months there was buried in one churchyard, commonly called the Cistercian, or Charter-house, above 50,000. They write further that through the kingdom it made such havock that it tooke away more than half the people; and it is noted there dyed in London alone, between the 1st of January and the 1st of July, 57,374. Soe Daniel, in 22, Edward III.”
It may be worthy of remark that of these plagues three are traced to Egypt or Ethiopia, while the fourth, as we shall presently see from Villani, is said to have originated in the north-east of Asia. Kircher, in his ‘Scrutinium de Peste,’ has given a catalogue of the most remarkable pestilences recorded, in which he mentions only one other universal plague, in the year 1400, but relates neither its origin nor its history. Another very destructive one broke out in the year 170 in Babylonia, which spread through the provinces, and carried off a vast number of persons at Rome. Galen was then living in the capital, and speaks of this disease as very similar to that described by Thucydides.
The present chapter will be employed in describing some of those pestilences which are most celebrated, either for the abilities exerted in describing them, or the ravages which they have committed; and will include the plagues of Athens, Constantinople, Florence, the plague of Milan in 1630, and of London in 1665. It is not our plan to give either a general history of the plague or a detailed account of the rise and fall, the symptoms and method of treatment of each particular scourge. The passages which we extract from Thucydides, Procopius, and Boccaccio, are complete in themselves; from those later pestilences, of which no master mind has given a comprehensive view, we have endeavoured to select such particulars and to quote such passages as show the moral consequences of the visitation, rather than to disgust by an often repeated story of suffering, or give a hospital chronicle of the varying intensity of the mischief from day to day.