These orders, in correspondence with the spirit of the 14th century, are sufficiently decided to indicate a recollection of the good effects of confinement, and of keeping at a distance those suspected of having plague. It was said that Milan itself, by a rigorous barricado of three houses in which the plague had broken out, maintained itself free from the “_Great Mortality_,” for a considerable time;[186] and examples of the preservation of individual families, by means of a strict separation, were certainly very frequent. That these orders must have caused universal affliction from their uncommon severity, as we know to have been especially the case in the city of Reggio, may be easily conceived; but Bernabo did not suffer himself to be frightened from his purpose--on the contrary, when the plague returned in the year 1383, he forbad the admission of people from infected places into his territories, on pain of death.[187] We have now, it is true, no account how far he succeeded; yet it is to be supposed that he arrested the disease, for it had long lost the property of the Black Death, to spread abroad in the air the contagious matter which proceeded from the lungs, charged with putridity, and to taint the atmosphere of whole cities by the vast numbers of the sick. Now that it had resumed its milder form, so that it infected only by contact, it admitted being confined within individual dwellings, as easily as in modern times. [186] _Adr. Chenot_, Hinterlassene Abhandlungen über die ärztlichen und politischen Anstalten bei der Pestseuche, Wien, 1798, 8vo. p. 146. From this period it was common in the middle ages to barricade the doors and windows of houses infected with plague, and to suffer the inhabitants to perish without mercy.--_S. Möhsen_, Loc. cit. [187] Chron. Reg. Loc. cit.