Although people everywhere have been through a very difficult time over the last couple of years, it’s not the first time that we have had to battle a deadly virus. We also fought bubonic plague from the fourteenth century and for several centuries after that.
Several outbreaks
The first outbreak of this deadly disease reached Britain in 1348 and lasted until 1350, wiping out almost half the population – an estimated 2 – 3 million people died. Some villages lost every person in them. In Fortingall, Scotland one old lady buried everyone in her small village. She put them in a mass grave which had originally been a Bronze Age tumulus. The stone marking it can still be seen.
Still around
And sadly it has not been completely eliminated even now, despite the fact that a similar type of illness was described as far back as 300 BC. In 542 AD an outbreak was certainly well documented in the Byzantine Empire. Surprisingly, the last suspected, but unconfirmed, case of the Black Death (plague) in the UK was as recently as 2014/15!
Cures
One of the oddest cures I came across when researching the plague involved chickens. Not nourishing chicken soup; this one involved live chickens. The feathers around a chicken’s backside were plucked, then the vent (bum hole) was placed over the node and the chicken held there until it eventually died. Then a new chicken replaced it. Apparently this was a fairly common treatment.
It gets worse
Blood letting was used for so many illnesses that it’s no surprise that the Plague was one of them. Quite how applying human excrement to the patient’s body was supposed to help, I’ve no idea. But at the time, it was thought to be an effective treatment. Another cure fell more into the realms of private treatment, because you’d have to be rich to be able to use it. You had to eat a spoon of crushed emeralds.
Confession first
The first question a visiting doctor asked his Plague patient was whether he had confessed or not. If the patient had not done so, then confession had to take place before medical treatment could begin.
Plague village
In the summer of 1665 a bale of cloth was delivered from London to a house in Eyam (pronounced ‘Eem’) in the Midlands county of Derbyshire. It is suspected that it carried the disease with it. In an effort not to carry the disease beyond their village, all the inhabitants decided not to travel beyond its boundaries. Payment was left at the edge of the village and provisions left in return.
Immunity
It seems that some villagers had a natural immunity to this deadly disease; some of their descendants still live in Eyam. The immunity was due to a particular chromosome. Despite all their efforts, 260 of the village’s inhabitants died from bubonic plague, the last one dying on 1 November, 1666. The survivors then burned their possessions and fumigated their homes.
