Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 February 1879 — HORRORS OF THE PLAGUE. [ARTICLE]

HORRORS OF THE PLAGUE.

Ms Me<ll:eval History—Ravages of the Pest In the Fourteenth Century. Many Americans are inclined to regard the plague which devastated the Old World in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as an extinct disease; to imagine that it could not now prevail in any part of civilization, owing to the absence of such conditions as produced and fostered it. Since they have begun to read of its ravages in Russia they have hardly thought it to be the old plague, but a variation of it with the same deadly name, a deadly distemper, though nothing like so terrible as the ancient pestilence, and very different in its symptoms and consequences. The plague in Russia to-day is, essentially, if not exactly, the same plague so horribly conspicuous in everv history of the middle ages, and which has pever ceased to exist in certain regions of the East. Since 1720, when it destroyed nearly half the entire population of Marseilles, France, and 1779. when it visited Russia and Poland.it has until the present been almost unknown in Western Europe. During the last 100 years it has been limited mainly to Egypt. Syria Anatolia, Greece and Turkey, occasionally spreading northward toward Russia and westwar I toward Malta. Tts true and permanent home seems to b« in the territory bordering on the eastern extremity of t'm Mediterranean, whore the conditions and habits of tho people foster and, stimulate it. Rut the ‘mass of Americans have so little knowledge of, and so small concern for, what is going on in that, quarter of the globe that, never thinking of the plague, they naturally presume its ghastly engagements closed long ago an I forever. The genuine plague is a very malignant kind of contagious fever, marked by hnboos, or sv'ellingsof the lymphatic glands, by carbuncles and petecehice. and without any apparent security against recurrence to the same person. It commonly begins with a feeling of intense.fatigue, slight chilliness, much nausea, giddiness, mental confusion and lumbar pains. These symptoms are speedily followed by increased disturbance of mind, with occasional stupor and delirium, by alternate pallor and flushing of face, suffusion of the eye and a sense of extreme restriction in or about the heart. Sharp, darting pains are experienced in the groins, armpits and other pirts of the body, soon succeeded by enlargement of the lymphatic glands, which occurs sometimes the first or second day, sometimes not until near the close of the disease, and at others not at all, and also the formation of carbuncles in various places. As the distemper advances, the tongue grows dry and brown, while the gums, teeth and lips are covered with a dark fur; the bowels, at first constipated, relax, and the evacuations are dusky, offensive and sanguineous. The patient loses much power of will over his muscles, and presents the appearance of intoxication. He is more or less faint throughout the attack, and usually the second or third day petecchice (purple spots), livid patches, like bruises, and dark stripes (vibiees) arc visible on the skin—especially in severe cases—in consequence of extravasation of blood, and are often accompanied with hemorrhagic discharges from the mucous membranes. In fatal cases the pulse gradually sinks; the sufferer’s body grows cold and clammy; blood flows from the mucous membranes; either coma or low delirium sets in, and death takes phve, either without a struggle or preceded by convulsions. The period of incubation in plague would seem in no case to extend beyond eignt days. Sometimes the local symptoms first show themselves, and the fever that follows is comparatively mild. At other times the disorder is rapid and violent, and causes death without the appearance of buboes or carbuncles. Between these extremes, tending to the mild or virulent form, the disease presents every phase of variety. In mild oases, small red spots, resembling fleabites, are se§n, especially on parts where the body is exposed to the air, gradually enlarge, get dusky, and are covered by vesicles tilled with a dark-hued fluid. The base of the spots is hard; grows black, forming a gangrenous eschar an inch or an inch and a half in diameter, and developing into carbuncles. This process is attended with more or less fever, which subsides gradually as the eschar is detached. Often consequent unnu the carbuncles, the buboes form in the groins or armpits; occasionally go away without suppuration, though generally after forming pus—sometimes healthy, sometimes thin and sanious. Buboes are generally attended with higher fever and greater depression of vital force, severe headache, great restlessness, and vertigo. At the commencement of malignant epidemics, patients have died within twenty-four hours, but generally it continues from one to two weeks; the average duration is six to eight days, and, when convalescence takes place.it it apt to be slow and tedious, 'when the disease is virulent, the majority of persons attacked by it die within a week. As here described, in later times the plague first appeared during the fourteenth century, when it actually desolated the world. One of the names it then bore was the Black Death, from the black sp >ts denoting putrid decomposition, which, at one of its stages, marked the sufferer. The accounts then furnished are incomplete and inexact, as they necessarily would be at such an epoch of semi-civilization; but they are sufficient to show a state of horrors and agony hard to exceed. The course and symptoms of the dreadful malady varied at different times and in different countries, and greatly changed toward the close (1318-51) of its ravages in Europe. Among the concomitants of the pestilence were noticed palsy of the tongue, which became black, as if suffused with

blood; putrid inflammation of the lungs; fetid, pestiferous breath, and expectoration of blood. When it spread to Europe, fever, evacuation of blood and pulmonary carbuncles proved mortal before other symptoms had been declared. In well-nigh all instances death ensued in two or three days After attack. Spots and tumors were the seals of doom which medical skill hod no power to avert and many sufferers anticipated by suicide. The rise and progress of the plague in the fourteenth century have not been clearly or consistently related; but there seems to be no doubt that it originated in China. There is also concurrent testimony that the co-operating causes existed and acted at least fifteen years before any outbreak in Europe, and are to be sought as far back as 1333, in a series of mighty convulsions of nature which continued for twenty-six years to affect and derange the normal conditions of animal and vegetable life. The precise date of the beginning of the plague in China is unknown; but from 1333 to 1349 that country suffered fearfully from droughts, famine, floods, swarms of locusts, and earthquakes that overthrew cities and leveled mountains, and these catastrophes were followed by the scourge. At the same time the order of things seemed to.be reversed in Europe. Thunder-storms occurred in midwinter, ice formed in summer, tornadoes swept regions that had never felt them before, volcanoes, long thought extinct, blazed with fury, and water-spouts- rose in placid seas. The mortality was hideous in the East and West, and it is believed that the great activity of the globe, accompanied by decomposition of vast organic masses, myriads of locusts, bodies of brutes and men, produced some change in the atmosphere hostile to life. It is said that, in the progress of the plague westward, the impure and poisoned air was traceable as it moved on laden with pestilence and death. A writer of the time remarks: “A dense, awful fog was seen in the heavens rising in the east, and descending -upon Italy.” The inhabitants of Europe are also thought to have been predisposed to t he pest partly from scarcity, and partly from the then inadequate modes of living. The theory is very plausible that it sprung directly from atmospheric poison, acting on the respiratory organs, which were the first to be attacked. Still, while impure air and defective physical conditions may have fed the pestilence largely, it doubtless owed its extension almost entirely to infection and contagion. It seems that it had appeared in Europe in milder ft rm in 1342; but it had to come to an end, and there is little reason to hold, as has been held, that it had in the interval remained latent until new causes had requickened it six years later. The invasion of 1348 may be distinctly tracked in its advance from China along the caravan routes toward the West. The northern coast of the Black sea sent the plague by contagion to Constantinople; thence in the same way it reached the ports of Italy, and was so diffused throughout the remainder of Europe. Its progress may be followed through Germany and France to England, whence it was transmitted to Sweden. Three years elapsed from its appearance in Constantinople until it crept by a great circle to the Russian territories; and the fact of its contagious communication has started the speculation whether by rigid quarantine it might not have been excluded altogether from Europe. Such rules have now long been enforced at many points to prevent introduction into the West of the plagues of the Orient, but they have been insufficient in the present instance to keep it out of Russia. The mortality, though no proper estimate can be made iu the absence of statistics, was prodigious—supremely terrifying. In China alone 13,000,000 persons are asserted to have died, and in other parts of the East nearly 24,000,000 more. In Europe details were more exact. Tn London 100,000 souls perished, and in fifteen Continental cities about 300,000. Germany lost, it is calculated, 1,214,434, and Italy onehalf of her whole population. It is within bounds to say that in all Europe not less than 25,000,000 people were slain by the scourge. Africa suffered terribly likewise, and it is believed that the globe was deprived during that century of fully from 70,000,000 to 75,000,000 human beings from ravages of the plague. The mere facts are appalling to the imagination; the scenes of suffering are scarcely credible. Death was everywhere: it seemed to have usurped the place of life. All animal life was menaced; birds, beasts, men, women, and children, hosts of members of every nationality, savages, scholars, peasants, priests, Princes, Kings, of every creed, clime, and race, were swept from the face of the earth. Rivers were consecrated to receive corpses for which none dared to perform the rites of burial; bodies were cast by thousands into huge pits dug for the purpose. Death stalked over sea as well as over land. The entire crews of vessels 'were killed by the poi-son-breath that infested the globe. Ships freighted with putrefying bodies drifted aimlessly and hideously on the Mediterranean, Black and North seas—not a human creature alive anywhere—and spread contagion on the shores whither the winds and tides had driven them. Hope, peace, content, law, order, affection, naturalness, humanity seemed never to have been. Ancient custom and the need of companionship were f*r the time obliterated; all was death, agony and despair, and by these the infected world appeared to be exclusively and shudderingly possessed. The moral effects of the plague were not less dreadful than its physical destruction. Thousands perished from fear, which dissolved among the living all ties of kindred, all bonds oPfellowship, all links of sympathy. Children fled from their polluted parents; mothers deserted their helpless infants; husbands and lovers left their wives and mistresses to die howling and alone. Terror generated superstition; the virtuous and vicious alike made distracting and distracted appeals to a God who, they imagined, had sent the pestilence to punish them for manifold sins. Crowds rushed to sacrifice their worldly goods to the church; fanaticism sweUed on every hand; women screamed to Heaven for mercy ; men tore out their hair and scourged themselves until they had fainted from loss of blood, that they might propitiate a deity whom they actually believed they had enraged. The | world was mad with fright, suffering, and superstition, and thousands who had tried to stay the pestilence with prayer declared that God was dead and hell had begun on earth. The horrors of the time were further heightened by cruel persecutions against the Jews, who had been accused of poisoning the public wells, this being in popular belief the cause of the pestilence. The people rose in mad fury to • exterminate the unfortunate Hebrew race, and slaughter them by tens of | thousands. In the inconsiderable city ; of Montz (Germany) alono, near 15,000 fell victims to the public wrath. They were killed with steel and club, hanged, drowned, burned, and often barbarously put to death by every kind of torture. In numberless instances they took their own lives in masses to avoid cruelties of the mob, and in many communities every man, woman, and child was sacrificed to insensate rage. To aggravate the scourge, the panic about poison caused the wells to be closed. The people were afraid to toqch water, and

those who escaped the plague perished of thirst and terror. Society, rude at best in that day, was totally disorganized, and such means as might have been adopted to prevent or mitigate the stupendous evil were either neglected or unthought of, in the derangement and frenzy that possessed everybody, from the highest to the lowest. The influence of the plague and its desolation were so overwhelming that it frequently destroyed all honesty and principle among its survivors. Many were rendered callous, and many took advantage of the universal horror to indulge their worst passions, to plunder, murder, and perpetrate the most revolting crimes. The plague has again and again visited Western Europe since the fourteenth century, but never has it been so baleful as then, continued so long, or been attended with such incidental horrors. Previous to its last outbreak, in 1665, it invaded England, according to the celebrated physician, Sydenham, every thirty or forty years. Although its symptoms and virulence have varied at different times, its general feature have been sufficiently alike to prove that it is always the same terrible disease. Great difference of opinion still exists hs to its cause. Some authorities maintain that it is exclusively propagated by a peculiar contagion; others contend, while admitting its contagiousness, that it may also be engendered spontaneously by endemic or epidemic influences; others again deny its contagiousness altogether, and assert that it arises from local or epidemic causes. Intelligent opinion favors the second of these views, and there is a mass of sound evidence to sustain it. Whatever the cause, temperance seems to affect it favorably. In the tropics it is unknown, and the cold of northern climates has been observed to check its ravages. In Europe it has been most fatal during summer and autumn, especially in September. Thus, in London, in 1665, the deaths from the pestilence were, in June, 590; in July, 4,129; in August, 20,046; in September, 26,230; in October, 14,373; in November, 3,449; while in December they fell below 1.000. The precise nature of the distemper is still unknown. A poison whose properties evade all chemical and microscopic detection is absorbed into the system, and alters at once, or after a brief period of incubation, the quality of the blood and the condition of the tissues. The plague in Russia, this year, has come, as before, from Turkey, but the Russian authorities seem at present most active and energetic in measures to prevent its spread. Still, so dreadful is the pest, so inconceivable are its horrors to those who have not witnessed them, that it is not strange Austria, Germany and other countries of Europe should be alarmed. While it is unlikely to make much advance toward the West, too great caution cannot be exercised ; and, whatever may happen, we have the comfort, of knowing that in the latter half of the nineteenth century the best part of Europe and America is free from peril of panic and superstition, and can meet any danger and death in any form with calmness and reason, science and philosophy.