The Epidemics of the Middle Ages by J. F. C. Hecker and John Caius

wanting[424]. With all the above phenomena, the epidemics which took place in Germany and France at the commencement of the sixteenth century, evidently unite to form a connected whole. Varying in intensity and extent, they continued without intermission for full five years, and moreover were accompanied by unusual circumstances, such as occur only in the time of great pestilences. The century was ushered in by the appearance of a comet[425], which, on this occasion, seemed to confirm the long cherished belief that the appearance of these heavenly bodies was prognostic of evil. For mankind are in the habit of concluding that phenomena which are simultaneous must have some internal connexion, and many examples were called to mind in which great pestilences affecting the whole world had been either preceded or accompanied by comets[426]. Immediately afterwards a great murrain among cattle took place, which may have proceeded from some injurious quality in their food. A notion immediately arose that the pastures were poisoned, and of this there was so firm a conviction, that the most violent resentment, as of old, in the time of the Black Death, prevailed against the supposed poisoners, and in the neighbourhood of Meissen some “böse Buben” (wicked knaves) who had fallen under suspicion, were actually executed[427]. A very considerable blight of caterpillars which, in the north of Germany, stripped the gardens and woods far and wide of their foliage, deserves to be here mentioned as a phenomenon appertaining to the lower grades of the animal kingdom[428]. Natural history has shewn that occurrences of this kind are by no means occasioned by new and wonderful influences, but rather by unusual combinations of circumstances, appearing to occur together almost accidentally, at a given time; especially by the simultaneous union of warmth and humidity in the atmosphere, whereby sometimes one and sometimes another of the lower grades of animal existences becomes extraordinarily developed. It is on this account that unusual phenomena in the insect world, whether it be the appearance or the disappearance of particular kinds, take place much more frequently when the order of succession in the seasons and the condition of the atmosphere are in a greater degree than usual and more permanently disturbed; and thus those phenomena have, with much reason, ever been considered as forerunners of pestilences, whenever the human frame has become, through atmospherical causes, generally susceptible of disease. Swarms of locusts have appeared before and during most great pestilences, and indeed the exuberant production of this insect appears, at least in Europe, to require the most unusual combination of causes. SECT. 7.—BLOOD SPOTS. Of rarer occurrence, but quite as important in reference to the general tendencies of life, are _the luxuriant growths of the minutest cryptogamic plants in the water, and on damp things of all kinds_, which, from their spots of various forms and colours, produced the utmost horror both before and during great pestilences, and excited superstitious fears, as appearing to be something miraculous. These spots (signacula), and especially the _blood-spots_, were seen at a very early period, as for instance during the great general plague in the sixth century[429], and again, during the plague of the years 786[430] and 959, when it is said to have been remarked, that those on whose clothes they frequently appeared, and seemingly imparted to them a peculiar odour, were more susceptible than other people of attack from leprosy, on which account this spotted appearance was inconsiderately called the clothes leprosy[431], (Lepra vestium;) not to mention other examples[432] in which plagues affecting the human species did not take place. The same signs also, in the years from 1500 to 1503, threw the faithful into great consternation, because, as on former occasions, they fancied they recognised in them the form of the cross[433]. The phenomenon on this occasion spread throughout Germany and France, and from its great extent and long duration, may be reckoned among the most remarkable of the kind. The spots were of different colours, principally red, but also white, yellow, grey, and black, and arose, often in a very short time on the roofs of houses, on clothes, on the veils and neck handkerchiefs of women, on various household utensils, on the meat in larders, &c. A historian, who speaks also of blood-rain[434], recounts that they could not be got rid of in less than ten or twelve days, and that they frequently occurred in closed chests, on linen and on articles of clothing[435]. Much information is not to be expected from the researches of the naturalists of those times, but there is no doubt that what is described was some one or more kinds of mould[436], inasmuch as the whole phenomenon evidently corresponds with modern observations[437]. Scientific physicians of the sixteenth century, among whom the naturalist George Agricola, who was born in 1494, and died in 1555, ought especially to be mentioned, recognised, even then, these spots as lichens, and without seeking to account for them by supernatural agencies, or lending credence to popular superstition, they gave them their just interpretation as indications of extensive disease[438]. Should the too bold notion of Nees v. Esenbeck, that fungi of the most minute forms have their origin in the higher regions of the firmament, and descending to the surface of the earth, produce spots and stains, be confirmed, which is not yet the case, these “signacula” would have a much more important connexion with epidemics than can be otherwise conceded to them; for though it be highly probable that they have their origin only in the dissemination of germs in the lower strata of the atmosphere, it must yet be granted, that if they appear over a considerable space, and during a long time, as at the commencement of the sixteenth century, the causes favouring their generation and spread, must be ranked among those of an extraordinary kind, and on this very account may exercise an influence over human organism, as was then evident. For so early as the fruitful year 1503, the plague, which had already appeared partially, made great advances, and France in particular was visited by so fatal a pestilence, that the inhabitants of towns and villages, in order to escape the infection, fled in bodies to the woods, and even the house-dogs became wild, which never happens, unless a country be extensively depopulated[439]. They were obliged to establish great hunts, in order to free the country from these new beasts of prey, and from wolves which appeared in great multitudes[440]. The dry and continued heat of the following year, 1504, having given rise to still more extensive sickness, and caused a failure in the crops, the bubo plague raged in Germany with such violence, that in some places a third part, and in others as many as half the inhabitants perished. Various kinds of fevers accompanied this overwhelming disease, among which there was one distinguished by headache and phrensy similar to that which appeared in France, in 1482[441]. Various putrid fevers and putrid inflammations of the lungs with bloody expectoration, are also no less plainly discernible from the accounts[442]. This diversified and general sickness throughout the whole of Germany, terminated in the cold winter of 1504–5 and the following summer, during which there was a continued murrain among cattle. It is certain, that at that time the petechial fever in Italy, had not yet passed the Alps. _From all these facts it is a probable conjecture, that the Sweating Sickness which visited England in the year 1506, although accompanied in that country itself by no prominent circumstances, was not without connexion with the morbid commotion of human and animal life in the south and middle of Europe, and may perhaps be regarded as having been the last feeble effort of mysterious agencies in the domain of organized being._