England in the Age of Chivalry . . . and Awful Diseases by Ed West

Author:Ed West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2018-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Theories

In October 1348, the king of France asked the leading thinkers at the University of Paris for their theories about what was causing the disease. Putting together all their knowledge, wisdom, and studies, the doctors concluded that it was all down to ‘a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius’ that took place on March 20, 1345, because a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter always brought disaster and Mars and Jupiter together meant plague. Well it’s a theory, and it became the official explanation accepted across the continent, even in Muslim Spain.12

Medical science had hardly improved since classical Greece; surgery was also seen as low-grade manual labor, and touching naked bodies was viewed as beneath the dignity of a cleric; this is why surgeons in Britain are today not doctors but mere misters. The most important anatomist of the age, John of Ardene, who ‘made important contributions to the treatment of gout, clysters, and fistula,’ learned everything from being an army surgeon in the Hundred Years’ War, where the one thing they weren’t short of was dead bodies.13

Across Europe it was believed that ‘bad drove out bad’ so people took to inhaling unpleasant odors to rid themselves of the horrible-smelling plague. Contemporary doctor John Colle believed that ‘[a]ttendants who take care of latrines and those who serve in hospitals and other malodorous places are nearly all to be considered immune.’ As a result, ‘it was not unknown for apprehensive citizens of a plague-struck city to spend hours each day crouched over a latrine absorbing with relish the foetid smells.’14

Other remedies, in the words of one historian, ‘have a certain antiquarian charm but you would not want to undergo them.’15 A handbook for doctors at St. Bart’s in London recommended women’s milk sucked directly from the breast, and if no lactating women were available then asses’ or goats’ milk should work. How the women felt about having Plague victims fondling their breasts is never explained; the donkeys probably weren’t that ecstatic either, for that matter. Also advised was having a bath with the head entirely covered and chest wrapped in the skin of a small goat, which probably couldn’t do much harm.

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that humans learned the cause of bubonic plague—rats and their plague-carrying fleas—and it’s quite reasonable to be confused, as the disease-carrying fleas could survive forty days without a rat.

Whatever the fancy theories of the eggheads at Paris University, most people thought the obvious answer was that the ‘Great Mortality,’ as they called it, was caused by God’s anger. Contemporaries saw all sorts of omens to confirm this: a column of fire was spotted above the papal palace at Avignon, a ball of flames above Paris, a stranded whale, mysterious bloodstains on men’s clothes that turned out to be butterfly excrement. There was a small earthquake in Hull in December 1348, followed by the birth of conjoined twins nearby.

The pope decreed that a penitent procession be held in which

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