y of the tongue, while others remained sleepless
and without rest. The fauces and tongue were black and as if suffused
with blood; no beverage could assuage the burning thirst, so that
suffering continued without alleviation until death, which many in
their despair accelerated with their own hands. Contagion was evident,
for attendants caught the disease from their parents and friends, and
many houses were emptied of their inhabitants. In the fourteenth
century this affection caused still deeper sufferings, such as had not
been hitherto experienced. The organs of respiration became the seats
of a putrid inflammation, blood was expectorated, and the breath
possessed a pestiferous odor. In the West an ardent fever, accompanied
by an evacuation of blood, proved fatal in the first three days. It
appears that buboes and inflammatory boils did not at first appear, but
the disease in the form of carbuncular affection of the lungs (anthrax
artigen) caused the fatal issue before the other symptoms developed.
Later on in the history of the plague the inflammatory boils and buboes
in the groins and axillae were recognized at once as prognosticating a
fatal issue.

The history of this plague extends almost to prehistoric times. There
was a pest in Athens in the fifth century before Christ. There was
another in the second century, A.D., under the reign of Marcus
Aurelius, and again in the third century, under the reign of the Gauls;
following this was the terrible epidemic of the sixth century, which,
after having ravaged the territory of the Gauls, extended westward. In
542 a Greek historian, Procopius, born about the year 500, gives a good
description of this plague in a work, "Pestilentia Gravissima," so
called in the Latin translation. Dupouy in "Le Moyen Age Medical," says
that it commenced in the village of Peleuse, in Egypt, and followed a
double course, one branch going to Alexandria and the other to
Palestine. It reached Constantinople in the Spring of 543, and produced
the greatest devastation wherever it appeared. In the course of the
succeeding half century this epidemic became pandemic and spread over
all the inhabited earth. The epidemic lasted four months in
Constantinople, from 5000 to 10,000 people dying each day. In his
"History of France," from 417 to 591, Gregorius speaks of a malady
under the name inguinale which depopulated the Province of Arles. In
another passage this illustrious historian of Tours says tha