Don’t take baths and don’t sweat both will open the pores of your body and let the venomous air get in. If an outbreak of the plague has happened again, you can take the following steps to protect yourself.
#BLACK DEATH MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS HOW TO#
This treatise tells you everything you need to know to avoid getting sick during the next pandemic. It opens by telling readers how to avoid catching the plague: It pairs this medical treatise with narratives of knights and griffons, instructions on good table manners, stories of saints and lions, and other entertaining or informative texts. The version I use appears in British Library, Cotton Caligula A ii, which is a popular household manuscript from the mid-fifteenth century.
#BLACK DEATH MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS MANUALS#
It would appear amongst romances, poems, saint’s lives, conduct manuals and other popular literature of the period. Its survival in large manuscripts of popular literature also reinforces how widely it circulated. It was shorter, widely available, easy to read, and it offered advice that was understandable and easy to follow. This version was very much so intended for a popular reading audience. Matheson.Ī popular Middle English derivative of this text attributed to John of Bordeaux circulated widely in England in the years following the Black Death. To learn about the dissemination of this treatise read “ Médecin sans Frontières? The European Dissemination of John of Burgundy’s Plague Treatise” by Lister M. It appeared originally in Latin but was quickly translated into English, French, Dutch, and Hebrew. One of the most popular plague treatises, called De epidemia (or De pestilentia), was written by John of Burgundy sometime around 1365. If you want to read more about the range of medical manuscripts circulating in Middle English, check out Rossell Hope Robbins’ “ Medical Manuscripts in Middle English.” These were often translations of Latin texts that made extensive references to sometimes falsified authorities. And so, a sequence of popular medical treatises in English also circulated amongst the general populace and the various surgeons, apothecaries, cunning-men, wise women, and midwives who treated them. These treatises, however, were inaccessible to most members of the general population who could not read Latin and did not have access to prestigious doctors.
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Formal and respectable medical treatises produced by university-educated physicians appeared in Latin. In England, treatises in both Latin and English circulated. So, doctors and other less professionally trained individuals began to produce tracts informing people how to avoid and treat this disease. A lack of medical knowledge about its actual cause and no effective medical technology to treat it meant that the plague continued to ravage the world for centuries after the end of the Black Death. The disease itself did not disappear once the height of the pandemic was over. People were also keen to avoid catching the plague. People wanted to know why and how the pandemic had happened and how they could prevent one from happening again. The devastation caused by that pandemic and the lack of ability of the medical community to respond effectively resulted in an outpouring of pandemic writing.
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In 1348 the medical faculty of the University of Paris issued a compendium of opinion that suggested the pandemic was caused by “a major conjunction of three higher planets in Aquarius.” In the same year, the physician Gentile Da Foligno suggested it was caused by “a certain poisonous matter, which is around the heart and lungs and is generated there.” That year the professor of medicine at the University of Lérida Jacme D’Agramont also speculated on “whether its corruption or putrefaction was sent for our deserts in chastisement for our sins, or whether it came through the infection of the earth.” The range of responses gives a sense of how ill-equipped the medical community was to respond at the beginning of the outbreak.Īfter the pandemic had run its course the medical community and general populace were keen to ensure they were better prepared for next time. They blamed it on everything from the movement of the planets, to bad smells, to sin. The disease was perhaps most frightening because the medical community was baffled by its appearance and could do little to stop its spread.