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

by John Kelly

There are men who ooze pus from facial and body sores and stink to high heaven; lethargic men who stare listlessly into the cruel, gray sea; mad men who laugh hysterically and dig filthy fingernails into purple, mottled flesh; and dead men, whose bloated bodies roll back and forth across pitching decks until they hit a rail or mast and burst open like piñatas.

Between Joanna’s trial in March and late spring, when he fled to the papal retreat at Etoile-sur-Rhône, the pope spent a great deal of time seated between two roaring fires in the papal chambers. The fires were the idea of surgeon de Chauliac, who believed heat would cleanse the papal chambers of infected air, thought to be the cause of the pestilence. And the treatment worked, though for reasons that would have surprised the surgeon: the fires kept the papal chambers free of infected fleas.

Diet, for example, was useful because it enhanced immune system function, not because it balanced the four humors, fire because it drove away fleas. For all his careful training and his command of the Arab and Greek masters, the best advice Chaucer’s new medical professional could offer his patients was the commonsensical admonition to “run far and run fast.” And by the time the plague neared Paris in the summer of 1348, even that advice was becoming ineffective since the pestilence was now everywhere, from the Mongolian Plateau to the coast of Greenland.

this kind of indifference became common later in the mortality as the monotony of death replaced the terror of death.