SOURCE2 A Welsh writer, who died in April 1349, described the buboes that appeared on the bodies of victims.
It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion, a small boil that spares no-one. Great is its seething, like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of an ashy colour. It is an ugly eruption that comes with unseemly haste. It is a grievous ornament that breaks out in a rash. The early ornaments of black death.
Doctors themselves began dressing in long hooded robes to protect themselves from infection. They would also wear a face mask that had a long beak-like structure at the front. This beak would contain sweet smelling herbs or oils, designed to filter any evil smells that the doctor might be exposed to. Some towns resorted to the ‘cure of sound’. They would loudly ring the church bells, or fire off cannons, in the hope that the noise would frighten the plague and drive it away. In addition to prayer, spells and charms of all sorts were used in the hope of driving away the evil. These included washing the skin with vinegar and rose water, or applying a mixture of tree resin, white lily roots and dried human excrement to buboes that had been cut open.
SOURCE3 Doctors attempted to treat the plague by draining the bad blood from the buboes in this fourteenth-century fresco.
Did you know? One plague prevention method involved the mixing of roasted and ground eggshells with the leaves and petals of marigold flowers, stirring this mixture with treacle into a pot of warmed ale, and drinking it twice a day. A similarly exotic remedy was to place a live hen near the swelling to draw out the disease and then drink a cup of your own urine twice a day. Some effective treatments The most successful measures taken to avoid the plague were those that involved forms of quarantine. In fact, the word quarantine comes from the Italian for forty days — quaranta giorni . In Venice, ships suspected of being infected had to stay on an island next to the city for 40 days to ensure they weren’t carrying the disease. Islamic religious teachings encouraged people to not flee the plague, but to stay where they were to avoid infecting others. However, these methods did not completely stop the disease. For many people, simply fleeing an infected town or village was the best form of protection, although it was usually only the wealthy who could take advantage of this. In the French city of Avignon, Pope Clement VI sat between two large fires designed to purify the air. The plague bacteria cannot survive intense heat, and fleas also dislike heat, so this method may well have been the most effective. 3.15.2 Religious responses Followers of all religions saw the Black Death as divine punishment. • Christians believed they were punished for sins; they turned to prayer and pilgrimages. • In Mecca (in 1348) Muslims saw the plague as punishment for allowing non-believers into the holy city.
100 Jacaranda Humanities Alive 8 Victorian Curriculum Third Edition
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