Plagioclase

“ Of all these notions and views regarding the plague, whose development we have represented, there are two especially, which are prominent in historical importance:—1st, The opinion of learned physicians, that the pestilence, or epidemic constitution, is the parent of various kinds of disease; that the plague sometimes, indeed, but by no means always, originates from it: that, to speak in the language of the moderns, the pestilence bears the same relation to contagion that a predisposing cause does to an occasional cause ”

“ One must consider that at the time plague was such an appalling and mysterious disease that even the doctors feared for their lives each day, though it was their business to face it. How much more awful the invisible foe must have seemed to a layman, and still more to one who had to lead the attack on it as he did most cheerfully and energetically without experience of the ways of infectious diseases! ”

“ Some people, however, are said to have seen the plague, its appearance being that of an old woman, tall, thin, and ghastly, and dressed sometimes in black, sometimes in white: she stalks along the streets—glides through the doors of the habitations of the condemned—and walks once round the room of her victim, who is from that moment death-smitten. It is also asserted that, when three small spots make their appearance upon the knee, the patient is doomed—he has got the plague, and his fate is sealed. ”

“ Up betimes and to my business of settling my house and papers, and then abroad and met with Hadley, our clerke, who, upon my asking how the plague goes, he told me it encreases much, and much in our parish; for, says he, there died nine this week, though I have returned but six: which is a very ill practice, and makes me think it is so in other places; and therefore the plague much greater than people take it to be. ”

“ The story of the third plague closes with the defeat of the magicians, the sixth with their inability to stand before the king, and the ninth with the final rupture, when Moses declares, “Thou shalt see my face no more” (viii. 19, ix. 11, x. 29) .
The first three are plagues of loathsomeness—blood-stained waters, frogs and lice; the next three bring actual pain and loss with them—stinging flies, murrain which afflicts the beasts, and boils upon all the Egyptians; and the third triplet are “nature-plagues”—hail, locusts and darkness. ”

“ The seven plagues are poured out under the sounding of that angel, hence the plagues are future, and constitute the third woe.
The foregoing reasons establish the fact that the plagues are future. We see no reason why they will not be similar in character to those poured out on Egypt, while their consequences will be far more terrific and dreadful. May God count us worthy to escape the things coming on the earth, and to stand before the Son of man. The seven last plagues are poured out on the living wicked ”

“ The plagues of the Middle Ages, for instance, seem to have been begotten of a strange bacillus engendered under conditions that sanitary science, in spite of its panacea of drainage, still admits are imperfectly understood, and for all we know even now we may be quite unwittingly evolving some new and more terrible plague—a plague that will not take ten or twenty or thirty per cent., as plagues have done in the past, but the entire hundred. ”

“ In the first place, the pestilential disease, or plague, seized upon the city, and ate up all the flower and prime of their youth and strength. Upon occasion of which, the people, distempered and afflicted in their souls, as well as in their bodies, were utterly enraged like madmen against Pericles, and, like patients grown delirious, sought to lay violent hands on their physician, or, as it were, their father. ”

“ Occasionally friends from Constantinople and Pera and some Germans of Ali’s household paid us a visit. When I asked them ‘Whether the plague was abating?’ one of them replied, ‘Yes, in a marked degree.’ ‘What is the daily death-rate then?’ quoth I, ‘About five hundred,’ said he. ‘Good God,’ I exclaimed, ‘do you call this the plague abating? How many used to die when it was at its height?’ ‘About a thousand or twelve hundred,’ he answered. ”

“ For there are a Set of distinguishing Symptoms as essential to the Pestilence, as the respective Eruptions are to the Small-Pox or Measles; which are indeed (as I have mentioned in the Preface) each of them Plagues of a particular kind.
As the Small-Pox discharges itself by Pustules raised in the Skin; so in the Plague the noxious Humour is thrown out either by Tumors in the Glands, as by a Parotis, Bubo, and the like; or by Carbuncles thrust out upon any part of the Body. ”

“ The 16th century was not more free from plague than the 15th. Simultaneously with a terrible pestilence which is reported to have nearly depopulated China, plague prevailed over Germany Holland, Italy and Spain, in the first decade of the century, and revived at various times in the first half. ”

“ Some important facts, not generally known, respecting old-time plagues and pestilences may be gleaned from parish registers and churchwardens’ accounts, and it is from such records that we propose mainly to draw materials for this chapter.
When a town was infected with the plague, business was suspended, and the inhabitants isolated from the neighbouring places. If a person desired to travel at large, he made application to the Mayor or Chief Magistrate, and [Pg 153] obtained a certificate to the effect that he was not suspected of the plague. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The first wave of this plague, in 1348, decimated the population by about one half in the towns and one third in the country. People tried to avoid the plague by flight. The agony and death of so many good people caused some question their belief in God. ”

“ The seeds of death found there fertile soil. Families were crowded together in close cabins and temporary shelters, to which they had been driven in multitudes from their ravaged fields. The plague first appeared in mid-April in the Piræus,—brought, perhaps, by merchant-ships,—but soon spread to Athens, and as the heat of summer came on the inhabitants of that thronged city fell victims to it in appalling multitudes. ”

“ The plague came to Perth, where they lived, so they built a bower in a wood, far off the town. But their lovers came to see them in the bower, and brought the infection of the plague, and they both died. There is a little churchyard and a ruined church in Scotland, where the people who died of the plague, more than two hundred years ago, were buried, and we used to believe that if the ground was stirred, the plague would fly out again, like a yellow cloud, and kill everybody. ”

“ France, where, under the fearful reign of Louis XI., oppression and misery seemed to mock the gifts of heaven, became in 1482, after a two 189years’ scarcity, the scene of a devastating plague. It was an inflammatory fever with delirium, accompanied by such intense pain in the head, that many dashed out their brains against the wall, or rushed into the water; while others, after incessantly running to and fro, died in a state of the greatest agony. ”

“ The third plague was, that however much of provisions and food might be prepared in the king's courts, were there even so much as a year's provision of meat and drink, none of it could ever be found, except what was consumed in the first night. And two of these plagues, no one ever knew their cause, therefore was there better hope of being freed from the first than from the second and third. ”

“ And if the priest shall look, and, behold, the plague be not spread in the garment, either in the warp, or in the woof, or in any thing of skin; then the priest shall command that they wash the thing wherein the plague is, and he shall shut it up seven days more: and the priest shall look, after that the plague is washed: and, behold, if the plague have not changed its colour, and the plague be not spread, it is unclean; thou shalt burn it in the fire: it is a fret, whether the bareness be within or without. ”

“ But cold were the sensations excited by words, burning though they were, and describing the death and misery of thousands, compared to what I felt in looking on the corpse of this unhappy stranger. This indeed was the plague. I raised his rigid limbs, I marked the distortion of his face, and the stony eyes lost to perception. As I was thus occupied, chill horror congealed my blood, making my flesh quiver and my hair to stand on end. Half insanely I spoke to the dead. So the plague killed you, I muttered. ”

“ In the second visitation of the Black Death, there were destroyed a great many children whom it had formerly spared, and but few women. The seventh plague of hail is within our conception; as is also that of darkness, the ninth plague.
It is not a little remarkable that of the ten plagues, seven of them depended upon agents intelligible to our comprehension; we can conceive of {36}the invasion of a country by myriads of loathsome insects and reptiles, and can imagine the wrath of an offended Deity directing the force of a supernatural storm of hail upon a disobedient people ”

“ As a whole nation suffers from the plagues, and as two of them affect fertility and plenty, the origin of the tale may be found in the mythical contest of divine powers with hostile potencies of blight, as at Mag-Tured.40 In a Triad the plague of the Coranlans Is called that of March Malaen from beyond the sea;41 and March suggests the Fomorlan More, who taxed the Nemedians in two-thirds of their children, corn, and milk on November-Eve.42 The Welsh plagues, however, occur at Beltane, i. ”

“ The excitement usually attendant upon specially fatal plagues and contagious diseases increases the tendency which the latter naturally have to cause hallucinations. During a plague in the reign of Justinian, men were seen walking through the crowd and touching here and there a person; the latter were at once attacked by the disease and invariably succumbed. Upon another such occasion marks and spots appeared on the clothing of those who had caught the contagion, as if made by invisible hands, the sufferers began next to see a number of spectres and died in a short time. ”

“ In the plague-years 664-685, and long after in the Black Death, the mortalities among the monks were of the same degree, only there was an easy explanation of them, in one if not in both cases, as being part of an imported infection universally diffused in English soil. What the nature of the occasional outbreaks in earlier times may have been, we can only guess: something almost as deadly, we may say, as the plague itself, and equally sudden. ”

“ During the fourteenth century men’s hearts, being very ignorant, were not very stout, and their purses were atrociously short. It would hardly be too much to say that during the Middle Ages, and up till about 1700, the greatest cause of death in cities was the plague. After 1700 people slowly began to become rich, and to build better houses which would keep the rat at a distance, so that man conquered the plague without knowing how he had done it. But the conditions in the Middle Ages must have been frightful. ”

“ Histories of the Plague, exhibiting the modifications it undergoes in different climates, must at all times and in all places be acceptable, if not to the public at large, at least to that class of persons who make the art of medicine their study and employ: But, to a country situated like our own, histories of this terrible disorder occurring in the northern parts of Europe are more particularly interesting, by holding up to our view a picture of what it probably would be, whenever it should visit us again. ”

“ In all violent plagues, we hear of the dead being left unburied; of their being cast into pits, &c. But if we wish to make any gross comparison between the destructive power of the true plague, and that of any other violent epidemic, we cannot, perhaps, have a better instance than that which took place at Bassorah (a city on the confines of Persia) in the years 1773 and 1780.4 In the former of these years that city was visited by the true plague; and in the latter, by an epidemic remittent fever. ”

“ That, upon fair investigation, it does not appear, that ancient historians have been able to ascertain the origin of any plague whatever: they have universally ascribed it to the anger of the Deity, while their own pride would never allow it to have originated in any country with which they were connected. ”

“ Still recurring scenes of misery and pain, the fruits of this distemper, made no more a part of our lives—the word plague no longer rung in our ears—the aspect of plague incarnate in the human countenance no longer appeared before our eyes. From this moment I saw plague no more. She abdicated her throne, and despoiled herself of her imperial sceptre among the ice rocks that surrounded us. ”

“ Gibbon estimates the total loss of life at a hundred millions; but one doubts if the population of the Roman Empire, even in its palmiest days, was ever much larger, and surely the plague could not have swept off everybody in the known world, though we do know that, if it really breaks loose in flea-bitten surroundings, plague can do an infinity of mischief, probably more than any other known disease. ”