PLATE XXVIII,
1. DRESS OF A MARSEILLES DOCTOR,
1720
PLATE XXVIII,
2. GERMAN CARICATURE
OF THE SAME
(Face Page 200)
M. Reber[191] describes [an engraving by John Melchior Fuesslin], representing a doctor in the plague of Marseilles. The legend beneath it, in German, is (translated) ‘Sketch of a Cordovan-leather-clad doctor of Marseilles, having also a nose-case filled with smoking material to keep off the plague. With the wand he is to feel the pulse.’ Reber’s and Manget’s plates are both reproduced in the Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Journal, March 1898, from the Janus blocks. Gaffarel[192] gives the costumes both of a doctor and of a hospital attendant: they closely resemble the dress of the Italian charitable guilds of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
By August 9 some of the physicians and almost all the master-surgeons had fled, and an ordinance was issued demanding their return, or in default their expulsion from their respective corporations, and other special penalties as well. Two physicians named Gayon volunteered their services for the Hôpital des Convalescents, but forthwith paid the penalty with their lives. In the absence of sufficient physicians in Marseilles, others were summoned from Montpellier, Paris, and elsewhere. These exhausted their energies in a dispute over the contagious character of plague. Chicoyneau and Chirac maintained that it was not contagious. Deidier proved, by successfully inoculating dogs with bile taken from plague subjects, that at any rate it was communicable. Each subsequently expounded his views in a formal discourse before the School of Montpellier.
Existing hospital accommodation was quite unequal to the needs. Emergency tents were erected outside the town, with mattresses for the sick. Chevalier Rose equipped and maintained a hospital in the district entrusted to him, at his own expense. A large temporary hospital of timber covered with sail-cloth was hurriedly erected, but when almost finished towards the end of September it was blown down by a gale, and was not rebuilt till October 4. This hospital, together with the Hôpital Général de la Charité of 800 beds, provided ultimately sufficient accommodation, so that none need remain in the streets.
From the first the mortality was such that it was wellnigh impossible to bury the dead. On August 8 the Assembly resolved that carts should be used to carry the dead to burial, and that pits should be dug in which the bodies could be buried in lime. So two huge pits were dug outside the walls, between the gate of Aix and that of Joliette, M. Moustier overseeing the diggers and compelling them to work. Chevalier Rose also had pits dug and organized a corps of buriers in his own district. The duties of burial were at first entrusted to sturdy beggars, but in a brief space of time the supply of these failed, so that bodies began to accumulate in the houses and streets. Then convicts were requisitioned in relays from time to time.