The Black Death, and The Dancing ManiaHecker, J. F. C. (Justus Friedrich Carl)
History
The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania
Hecker, J. F. C. (Justus Friedrich Carl)
Black Death; Chorea, Epidemic; Epidemics
In Germany there was a repetition in every respect of the same phenomena.
The infallible signs of the oriental bubo-plague with its inevitable
contagion were found there as everywhere else; but the mortality was not
nearly so great as in the other parts of Europe. The accounts do not all
make mention of the spitting of blood, the diagnostic symptom of this
fatal pestilence; we are not, however, thence to conclude that there was
any considerable mitigation or modification of the disease, for we must
not only take into account the defectiveness of the chronicles, but that
isolated testimonies are often contradicted by many others. Thus the
chronicles of Strasburg, which only take notice of boils and glandular
swellings in the axillae and groins, are opposed by another account,
according to which the mortal spitting of blood was met with in Germany;
but this again is rendered suspicious, as the narrator postpones the
death of those who were thus affected, to the sixth, and (even the)
eighth day, whereas, no other author sanctions so long a course of the
disease; and even in Strasburg, where a mitigation of the plague may,
with most probability, be assumed since the year 1349, only 16,000 people
were carried off, the generality expired by the third or fourth day. In
Austria, and especially in Vienna, the plague was fully as malignant as
anywhere, so that the patients who had red spots and black boils, as well
as those afflicted with tumid glands, died about the third day; and
lastly, very frequent sudden deaths occurred on the coasts of the North
Sea and in Westphalia, without any further development of the malady.
To France, this plague came in a northern direction from Avignon, and was
there more destructive than in Germany, so that in many places not more
than two in twenty of the inhabitants survived. Many were struck, as if
by lightning, and died on the spot, and this more frequently among the
young and strong than the old; patients with enlarged glands in the
axillae and groins scarcely survive two or three days; and no sooner did
these fatal signs appear, than they bid adieu to the world, and sought
consolation only in the absolution which Pope Clement VI. promised them
in the hour of death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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