The epidemic endured at Avignon for eight months, and Guy tells us that for the first three it took the form, in our terminology, of pneumonic plague and was intensely infectious, but for the other five it seems to have been the ordinary bubonic that was so fatal in London in 1665. Guy remained in Avignon for the Black Death, and faced its return twelve years later. In the first visitation the poor suffered, but in the second the rich; but, rich or poor, Guy remained at his post with his ample store of aloes to win the love of the dying whom he could not save. We know now some results of crude aloes which are not very pleasant, and I wonder whether Master Guy de Chauliac ever noticed them, or whether his patients ever came running to him to cure them of the effects of his aloes. To sum up, it is probable that the series of epidemics that we call the Black Death were all different varieties of the plague; bubonic, pneumonic, septicæmic, hæmorrhagic, etc. The sentimental and journalistic Nordic nations, such as the English and Germans, muttered the horrified name “Black Death,” afraid to give the thing a name, just as to-day they talk about the “Red Plague” or “a certain loathsome disease” when they mean to say syphilis; but the more clear-sighted and logical Mediterranean peoples knew that the thing certainly killed them, though they did not know what it was, so they simply called it La Grande Mortelaga—the Great Mortality, which it assuredly was. We prosaic moderns simply call it the plague, whose dread name even to-day makes us shudder. We do not fear it, because we know exactly how it is spread, and that, to use Osler’s epigrammatic words, all that one needs to defeat an epidemic of plague is a stout heart and a long purse. During the fourteenth century men’s hearts, being very ignorant, were not very stout, and their purses were atrociously short. It would hardly be too much to say that during the Middle Ages, and up till about 1700, the greatest cause of death in cities was the plague. After 1700 people slowly began to become rich, and to build better houses which would keep the rat at a distance, so that man conquered the plague without knowing how he had done it. But the conditions in the Middle Ages must have been frightful. Listen to the words of Dr. Abram in _English Life and Manners in the Later Middle Ages_ about the overcrowding, which would put even Glasgow to shame. He is referring to the Miller of Trumpington in Chaucer’s _Reve’s Tale_; and the miller cannot have been a very poor man; he was prosperous and on edge for his dignity. But in his house there was only one bedroom, where slept he himself, his wife, his baby, his grown-up daughter, and two undergraduates from Cambridge all at once.