The Black Plague

Around 1347-1348 the most well-known epidemic struck the European world. The bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death or the Black Plague, rained sickness over millions; for most people, death was the only end to the sickness. The Black Death is known as one of the most depressing occurrences in history. It attacked the three most important aspects of a person’s well-being, their mental, emotional and physical health. While the plague impacted early society, authors, Jean de Venette and Giovanni Boccaccio, described the epidemic in their own words. Modern author, Charles L. Mee Jr., describes the plague with the scientific knowledge he has living in today’s society. These three authors wrote about the bubonic plague with their own voice’s and reasoning’s but many of the accounts they mention are similar to one another. Jean de Venette, Giovanni Boccaccio and Charles L. Mee Jr. explain the symptoms, the causes and the way people acted because of the black plague.

Similar to any other diagnosed disease, the first way to tell if a person has an illness is by their symptoms. If the symptoms match the description of the disease, the person is usually diagnosed with that exact illness. Venette and Boccaccio describe the symptoms of the black plague in a similar way. Venette describes the only symptoms of the black plague to be swellings on the groined and armpit, sometimes both . This is a very vague description considering there are no other warnings or symptoms explained. Similarly, Boccaccio also mentions the appearance of swellings or tumors on the armpits and groins. However, Boccaccio incorporates more information that in the east, people would bleed from the nose instead of the tumors on the groin and armpit. Boccaccio also...

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...y had before it was too late. Similar to Boccaccio, Mee too lists the multiple reactions people exhibited. Fathers and mothers would abandon their children, people would swallow pus from plague victims, and, sick or not, citizens would be trapped inside their houses, left to die . Mee discusses the extremes that people would go to in order to keep the plague from infecting them. As discussed in Mee’s article, once the plague had hit a city it was every man or woman for themselves. Whether it was parent and child or husband and wife, the plague didn’t discriminate against who it would infect and who would not. Venette, Boccaccio and Mee each describe how the Black Plague affected society in different ways. Citizens who were lucky enough to survive the epidemic took major precautions against the infection and many of these precautions were became extreme measures.