The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by John Kelly

Avignon, however, was not bereft of heroism. The monks and brothers of La Pignotte, the municipal almshouse, displayed selfless devotion, feeding the hungry and tending the sick, swabbing oozing pustules, cauterizing painful buboes, bandaging cracked, gangrenous feet, washing bloodstained floors. But, alas, in a time of pestilence almost no good deed goes unpunished. The sick and dying who flocked to La Pignotte with contagious pneumonic plague made the almshouse a death trap. “Whereas at La Pignotte, they normally [go] through 64 measures of grain a day with one measure making 500 loaves of bread,” Heyligen noted, “now no more than one measure and sometimes only half is needed.”