In 1510 a pandemic of pulmonary disease came from Africa and “attacked at once and raged all over Europe not missing a family and scarce a person.” In 1580 another pandemic started in Asia, then spread to Africa, Europe, and America. It was so fierce “that in the space of six weeks it afflicted almost all the nations of Europe, of whom hardly the twentieth person was free of the disease,” and some Spanish cities were “nearly entirely depopulated by the disease.”
