The Black Death

The plague outbreak that suddenly afflicted Europe from 1347–51 was terrifying: it killed up to 60 per cent of the population, and doctors were powerless to treat it. This illness appeared, carried by wild rodents. The bubonic form was transmitted to humans via fleas, but the pneumonic form, the most lethal strain, was transferred from person to person through the air. Contemporaries clearly recognised the forms and symptoms of the plague. The French physician and surgeon Guy de Chauliac witnessed the epidemic in Avignon in 1348, to where it had spread rapidly from Italy. He noted that the pneumonic form was especially contagious, writing that one man “caught it from another not just when living nearby but simply by looking at him”. De Chauliac was one of the few to recover from bubonic plague, after falling into a gravely dangerous fever. Like the physicians of the University of Paris, who reported on the plague in October 1348, he identified the primary cause as a conjunction of planets in the sign of Aquarius in 1345. This signified a great mortality, and caused the air to become corrupted.