Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 291, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 December 1910 — “The Black Death" [ARTICLE]

“The Black Death"

The plague, or Asiatic cholera, or as it used to be called, “the black death," has been spreading of late in Europe. In Russia, where the people are dirtiest and most superstitious, the plague thrives best. Seventy thousand persons are known to have died of this attack in Russia already. This is not surprising, for the inhabitants, instead of cleaning their wells, cleaning their bodies, and using their brains, get out the little ikons or Images which the Greek church sells at a considerable profit, and to these little Images superstitious peasants pray—the prayers being interrupted in thousands of cases by death from the plague. There is nothing more tragic in all the history of man than the record of ‘.“the black death” in Europe. 'ln the fourteenth century one epidemic after another spread among the people. Twenty-five millions of human beings are believed to have perished in thia single series of epidemics. The rich and the poor alike were affected. In Oxford two-thirds of the student population died. In Constantinople the people died at the rate of 10,000 a day. —Charms, incantations, fear, filth, ignorance and superstition fed the disease. Curious results came of the long period of panic and of dying. The famous “dance of death,” in which desperate human beings parodied and made fun of the plague, Illustrating the “dance of death” with grinning skulls and skeletons, was one feature of the epidemic. Another, curiously enough, was in England, the tremendous rise in the cost of labor. The workmen died so fast that there were few left to do the work, and, following the law of supply and demand, the few that could work were offered extravagant wages—although laws were passed to keep the wages down. And it is said that this snddeu rise in wages laid the foundation of the emancipation of working people in England. The plague in Europe appears now in the old familiar way—breaking out here and there, always in filth and in ignorance, spreading gradually. The disease is not thordughly understood now. But the method of fighting it is understood. The people must be well fed —a strong man may* have the disease germs with him, resist them and rid his system of them. The

weak, half-fed man dies—that is why the plague was often so violent in the old days just after a famine. As far back as the fourteenth century Gabriel de Mussis observed that those who escaped the plague gave ft to others with whom they came in contact. They gave it to others because they had the plague within themselves; their essential tract was infected with the disease, and this disease they scattered. It is some comfort to know that the disease can only be acquired by actually swallowing the disease germs. The man who will be sufficiently careful need not get the plague. If you will drink only water that you know to be clean, and only from vessels that you know to be clean; if you eat no fruit that has not been carefully cooked, or carefully peeled with an absolutely clean knife, and if all the food that you eat is well cooked and eaten when freshly cooked, you will not get the plague. The main thing is not to worry about it in this country. There is lit* tie chance, probably nppossibility whatever, of a plague of the old kind among us. The work that ia_not done by the little sacred images of the Russian peasants is done very well by good sewers, plenty of disinfectants, plenty of soap and hot water, and a little common sense.