ces, on the nature of the Black Death. The
descriptions which have been communicated contain, with a few unimportant
exceptions, all the symptoms of the oriental plague which have been
observed in more modern times. No doubt can obtain on this point. The
facts are placed clearly before our eyes. We must, however, bear in mind
that this violent disease does not always appear in the same form, and
that while the essence of the poison which it produces, and which is
separated so abundantly from the body of the patient, remains unchanged,
it is proteiform in its varieties, from the almost imperceptible vesicle,
unaccompanied by fever, which exists for some time before it extends its
poison inwardly, and then excites fever and buboes, to the fatal form in
which carbuncular inflammations fall upon the most important viscera.

Such was the form which the plague assumed in the fourteenth century, for
the accompanying chest affection which appeared in all the countries
whereof we have received any account, cannot, on a comparison with
similar and familiar symptoms, be considered as any other than the
inflammation of the lungs of modern medicine, a disease which at present
only appears sporadically, and, owing to a putrid decomposition of the
fluids, is probably combined with hemorrhages from the vessels of the
lungs. Now, as every carbuncle, whether it be cutaneous or internal,
generates in abundance the matter of contagion which has given rise to
it, so, therefore, must the breath of the affected have been poisonous in
this plague, and on this account its power of contagion wonderfully
increased; wherefore the opinion appears incontrovertible, that owing to
the accumulated numbers of the diseased, not only individual chambers and
houses, but whole cities were infected, which, moreover, in the Middle
Ages, were, with few exceptions, narrowly built, kept in a filthy state,
and surrounded with stagnant ditches. Flight was, in consequence, of no
avail to the timid; for even though they had sedulously avoided all
communication with the diseased and the suspected, yet their clothes were
saturated with the pestiferous atmosphere, and every inspiration imparted
to them the seeds of the destructive malady, which, in the greater number
of cases, germinated with but too much fertility. Add to which, the
usual propagation of the plague through clothes, beds, and a thousand
other things to which the pestilential poison adheres--a propa