Page:A litil boke the whiche traytied and reherced many gode thinges necessaries for the infirmite a grete sekeness called Pestilence.djvu/14

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enough from their growing familiarity with the style, and manner, of attack.

The treatise here reproduced furnishes an account of the various remedies, and curative methods, adopted in the middle ages for checking the advance of the terrible foe. The mere recital of the more serious attacks to which Europe was subjected from the time of the Black Death to that of the compilation of the present treatise, a period of a little over a century, is sufficient to give one some idea of the devastation that must have been wrought in Europe by this dreadful scourge.


THE PLAGUE IN MEDIAEVAL EUROPEThe Black Death is said to have originated in the Far East, and thence to have swept across Asia without a check. It made its appearance in Sicily in 1346, and in the following year broke out in Constantinople, Greece, and Italy. Thence it travelled across the Continent until it reached England in 1348, where it lasted for several years, being conveyed from this country in 1349 to Norway and the other Scandinavian states. In 1361, and again in 1368, we find numbers dying from the disease both in France and England. In 1370 countless victims are said to have perished from the plague in Ireland, which country again suffered severely from its ravages in 1383. The year 1375 witnessed an outbreak of a serious character in England, although not comparable to that of 1390-91, which was likened for its mortality to the Black Death of forty years before.