Note 13 — Chapter II · Rats and Men

For the sake of comparison it may be of interest to quote a few of the symptoms given in descriptions of other plagues. The account by Thucydides (ii. 49) of the plague in Athens, 430 B.C., is the most detailed: “All of a sudden,” he says, “people who were quite well before were seized with violent pains in the head, together with redness and inflammation of the eyes; the throat and tongue became blood-red, and the breath strangely disagreeable. Sneezing and sore throat ensued, and after a short time the lungs were affected and there was violent coughing. When the disease settled in the stomach it caused great disorder, with every known kind of purging of bile, accompanied by severe pain. Most patients suffered from an empty retching, with violent spasms, that sometimes gave relief at once, sometimes only after a long time. The surface of the body was not very hot to touch, nor was it pale, but suffused red or livid, covered with small spots and ulcers. But the internal heat was so great that the patients could not endure even the lightest clothes or muslins, but insisted on being naked, and longed to throw themselves into cold water. Many who were not looked after actually jumped into wells, overcome with unquenchable thirst; but it was just the same whether a patient drank much or little. All through the illness they were unable to keep still or get any sleep. Whilst the fever was at its height the body did not waste away, but resisted the disease beyond all expectation, so that most patients died from the internal fever on the seventh or ninth day with a good deal of strength still left; or, if they survived the crisis, the disease descended to the bowels, where it set up ulceration and such violent diarrhœa that in most cases death ensued from weakness.”

The chief symptoms given by Boccaccio in the Introduction to the “Decameron,” where he describes the plague in Florence (1348), are: “At the beginning of the disease both men and women developed swellings in the groin or under the armpit. These swellings grew to the size of a crab-apple or an egg, sometimes larger, sometimes less, and the common people called them ‘gavoccioli.’ In a short time this deadly sore began to spread to all parts of the body, and the nature of the disease gradually changed into black or livid spots, which appeared on the arms and thighs and other parts, sometimes large and scattered, sometimes minute and thick together.” He goes on to speak of the entire inability of doctors to deal with the plague, and of the readiness with which the smallest association or contagion spread it from one to another.

Defoe wrote only at secondhand about the plague of London (1665), but such symptoms as he gives of that “spotted fever” were probably taken from eye-witnesses with whom he had conversed. He mentions violent pains in the head, vomitings, and spots on the thighs; also “swellings, generally in the neck and groin, which, when they grew hard and would not break, grew so painful that it was equal to the most exquisite torture.... In some these swellings were made hard, partly by the force of the distemper, and partly by their being too violently drawn, and were so hard that no instrument could cut them, and then they burnt them with caustics, so that many died raving mad in the torment, and some in the very operation. In these distresses, some for want of help to hold them down in their beds, or to look to them, laid hands upon themselves. Some broke out into the streets, perhaps naked, and would run directly down to the river, if they were not stopped by the watchman or other officer, and plunge themselves into the water, wherever they found it.”