A treatise on plague : dealing with the historical, epidemiological, clinical, therapeutic and preventive aspects of the disease / by W. J. Simpson.

  • Simpson, W. J. (William John), Sir, 1855-1931.
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A treatise on plague : dealing with the historical, epidemiological, clinical, therapeutic and preventive aspects of the disease / by W. J. Simpson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    those who lived amongst people who died of plague was infectious. But at last it attacked Gloucester, yea and Oxford and London, and finally the whole of England so violently that scarcely one in ten of either sex was left alive. As the graveyards did not suffice fields were chosen for the burial of the dead. The Bishop of London bought the croft in London called ' No man's land,' and the Lord Walter de Magne that which is called ' The New Church Hau,' where he founded a house of persons in religion to bury the dead. All pleas in the King's Bench and common pleas of necessity were stopped. Very few nobles died of it. Among them were Lord John of Montgomerie, Captain of Calais, and the Lord of Clistele; they died in Calais and were buried in London in the Church of the Carmelite Brothers of Blessed Mary. A countless number of common people and a host of monks and nuns and clerics as well, known to God alone, passed away. It was the young and strong that the plague chiefly attacked. The old and feeble it commonly spared. Scarcely anyone dared to touch the sick; the healthy fled from relics of the dead, precious then and now, as if they were infectious. One day men were as happy as could be, and on the morrow they were found dead. Abscesses suddenly breaking out in different parts of the body tortured them; they were so hard and dry that when they were cut hardly any humour flowed from them: many persons got over them by means of incision or by long patience. Others had small black pustules spread all over the skin, and of these very few, nay rather scarcely one recovered. This great pestilence, which began at Bristol on the feast of the Assumption of the glorious Virgin and in London about the feast of St Michael, raged for a whole year in England so terribly that it cleared many country villages entirely of every human being. While this great calamity was devastating England, the Scots rejoicing thought that they would obtain all they wished against the English, and at the time blaspheming were wont from sheer wantonness to perjure themselves ' by the vile death of the English.' But sorrow following on the heels of joy, the sword of the anger of God departing from the English drove the Scots to frenzy through leprosy no less than it had done the English through abscesses and pustules. In the following year it ravaged the Welsh as well as the English: and at last, setting sail, so to speak, for Ireland it laid low the English living there in great numbers, but scarcely touched at all the pure Irish who lived amongst the mountains and on higher ground until the year of Christ L357, when it unexpectedly and terribly destroyed them also every-