ed.

Boccacio, who was an eye-witness of its incredible fatality in Florence,
the seat of the revival of science, gives a more lively description of
the attack of the disease than his non-medical contemporaries.

It commenced here, not as in the East, with bleeding at the nose, a sure
sign of inevitable death; but there took place at the beginning, both in
men and women, tumours in the groin and in the axilla, varying in
circumference up to the size of an apple or an egg, and called by the
people, pest-boils (gavoccioli). Then there appeared similar tumours
indiscriminately over all parts of the body, and black or blue spots came
out on the arms or thighs, or on other parts, either single and large, or
small and thickly studded. These spots proved equally fatal with the
pest-boils, which had been from the first regarded as a sure sign of
death. No power of medicine brought relief--almost all died within the
first three days, some sooner, some later, after the appearance of these
signs, and for the most part entirely without fever or other symptoms.
The plague spread itself with the greater fury, as it communicated from
the sick to the healthy, like fire among dry and oily fuel, and even
contact with the clothes and other articles which had been used by the
infected, seemed to induce the disease. As it advanced, not only men,
but animals fell sick and shortly expired, if they had touched things
belonging to the diseased or dead. Thus Boccacio himself saw two hogs on
the rags of a person who had died of plague, after staggering about for a
short time, fall down dead as if they had taken poison. In other places
multitudes of dogs, cats, fowls, and other animals, fell victims to the
contagion; and it is to be presumed that other epizootes among animals
likewise took place, although the ignorant writers of the fourteenth
century are silent on this point.

In Germany there was a repetition in every respect of the same phenomena.
The infallible signs of the oriental bubo-plague with its inevitable
contagion were found there as everywhere else; but the mortality was not
nearly so great as in the other parts of Europe. The accounts do not all
make mention of the spitting of blood, the diagnostic symptom of this
fatal pestilence; we are not, however, thence to conclude that there was
any considerable mitigation or modification of the disease, for we must
not only take into account the defectiveness of the chronicles, but