The plague reached Marseilles, however, in 587, being carried there by a merchant vessel from Spain which entered the port as a center of an infection. Several persons who bought goods from this trading vessel, all of whom lived in one house nevertheless, were carried off by the plague to the number of eight. The spark of the epidemic did not burn very rapidly at first, but after a certain time the baleful fire of the pest, after smouldering slowly, burst out in a blaze that almost consumed Marseilles. Bishop Theodorus isolated himself in a wing of the cloister Saint Victor, with a small number of persons who remained with him during the plague, and in the midst of their general desolation continued to implore Almighty God for mercy, with fasting and prayer until the end of the epidemic. After two months of calm the population of the city commenced to drift back, but the plague reappeared anew and most of those who returned died. The plague has devastated Marseilles many times since the epoch just mentioned. Anglada[12] who, like the writer, derives most of his citations from Gregory of Tours, thinks that the plague that devastated Strasbourg in 591 was only the same _inguinal disease_ that ravaged Christendom. He cites, in support of his assertion, that passage from the historian poet Kleinlande translated by Dr. Boersch: “In 591 there was a great mortality throughout our country, so that men fell down dying in the streets, expiring suddenly in their houses, or even at business. When a person sneezed his soul was apt to fly the body; hence the expression on sneezing, ‘God bless you!’ And when a person yawned they made the sign of the cross before their mouths.” Such are the documents we possess on the great epidemic of inguinal plague of the fourth century, documents furnished by historians, to whom medical history is indebted, and not from medical authors, who left no marks at that period. THE BLACK PLAGUE. The Black Plague of the fourteenth century was more destructive even than the bubonic pest of the sixth century, and all other epidemics observed up to the present day. In the space of four years more than twenty five millions of human beings perished—one-half the population of the world. Like all other pestilences, it came from the Orient—from India, and perhaps from China. Europe was invaded from east to west, from south to north. After Constantinople, all the islands and shores of the Mediterranean were attacked, and successively became so many foci of disease from which the pestilence radiated inland. Constantinople lost two-thirds of its population. Cyprus and Cairo counted 15,000 deaths. Florence paid an awful tribute to the disease, so great being the mortality that the epidemic has often been called _Peste de Florence_; “100,000 persons perished,” says Boccaccio. Venice lost 20,000 victims, Naples 60,000, Sicily 53,000, and Genoa 40,000, while in Rome the dead were innumerable.