EPIDEMICS OF TIM MIDDLE AGES. * WE are not now going
to review the book in which Dr. Cumming announces with so much self-complacency the coming of "The Great Tribulation " ; our present business is with a writer of a very different kind, but one whose labours are related to those of the Scotch divine by the association of direct antagonism. It is plain from Dr. Hecker's recital of authentic facts that Dr. Cumming has based his interpretation of prophecy on a glaring falsification of secular history. He asserts that the opening of the seventh apocalyptic vial took place in 1848, and sustains his assertion by declaring that all the predicted tokens that should accompany that great catastrophe have already been made manifest. That he may make out his case, it is necessary for him to show, among other things, that there have been since 1848 unparallelled disturbances of the physical course of nature ; and accordingly he does allege, but not without nice rhetorical management, that this has actually happened. Mark with what insidious steps he creeps from the low level of acknowledged truths up to this towering untruth. " Disease," he says, " during the last ten years, has steadily struck with destructive blight the potato and the vine, men and cattle, with a force and frequency surely unusual ; and the only explanation scientific investigation has arrived at is just that stated in prophecy as the effect of the last vial, a morbifie taint or influence in the air.' " So far Dr. Cumming has fairly stated known facts ; and we are entirely in accord with him. The physical occurrences lie enumerates are of an unusual character, and the prevalent opinion respecting them among scientific men is that which he assigns ; but presently lie
begins to take higher ground. " I do not say," he continues, "there never was before cholera, or diphtheria, or miasma, destruc- tive of vegetable life ; but surely these influences, all of them the subjects of prophecy, have recently been developed with an in- tensity, a continuity, and to an extent, and with a concurrence at least most unusual." Here he approaches the summit on which he plants his sophistical flag in the following sentence : " There is at present an area, accumulation, and intensity of morbific agencies in the air which no precious year has witnessed." With this monstrous assertion we will confront a short passage from Dr. Babington's preface to his translation of Hecker's ac- count of the Black Death. It was written in 1833, after the first visitation of the cholera had passed away, and nothing has sub- sequently occurred to weaken its force or diminish its applicability to the circumstances of the present day :—
" I have another, perhaps I may be allowed to say a better, motive for laying before my countrymen this narrative of the sufferings of past ages,— that by comparing them with those of our own time, we may be made the more sensible how lightly the chastening hand of Providence has fallen on the present generation, and how much reason, therefore, we have to feel grateful for the mercy shown us."
The great pestilence of the fourteenth century, which raged for twenty-six years over the whole of the then known world, and which was called in the north of Europe the Black Death, and in Italy the Great Mortality, was preceded by prodigious disturb- ances of the earth and the atmosphere, which began in China in. the year 1333, fifteen years before the plague broke out in Europe. Parching droughts alternated with deluges of rain, in one of which more than 400,000 persons perished in and about Kingsai, at that time the capital of the empire. Earthquake succeeded. earthquake, swallowing up whole mountains and leaving vast lakes in their places, and one of these convulsions with which Kingsai was visited in 1338 was of ten days duration. Similar dis- turbances on a minor but still formidable scale occurred simulta- neously in Europe. They subsided after a continuance of fourteen years in China in 1347, and broke out in full fury in the follow- ing year in Europe, after the intervening districts of country had been probably visited in the same manner. Earthquakes were more general than they had been within the range of history,. and the air became vitiated in a manner never known before or since. "Never," says Hecker, "have naturalists discovered in the at- mosphere foreign elements, which, evident to the senses, and borne by the winds, spread from land to land, carrying disease over whole portions of the earth, as is recounted to have taken place in the year 1348." In thousands of places noxious vapours rose from chasms rent by earthquakes. A thick, stinking mist advanced from the East and spread over Italy, and the earthquake which converted the blooming island of Cyprus into a desert was preceded by a wind of so poisonous an odour that many fell down suddenly overpowered by it, and expired in frightful convulsions. The corrup- tion of the atmosphere came from the East ; but the Black Death it- self came notupon the wings of the wind, for it was in reality the Ori- ental Plague which had long been indigenous in Europe, and which was only excited and increased in virulence by the changed condition of the air. The mortality was enormous, beyond all parallel, but its exact measure cannot be ascertained. Whole cities and wide re- gions in the East were depopulated. Cairo lost daily, when the plague was at its height, from 10 to 15,000; being as many as in modern times great plagues have carried off during their whole course. It was reported to Pope Clement, at Avignon, • The Epidemics of the Middle Ages. From the German of J. F. C. Sleeker, M.D. Translated by B. G' Babington, M.D., F.R.S., &c. Third edition, com- pleted by the Author's Treatise on Child-Pilgrimages. Published by Trlibner and Co.
and Hecker admits the credibility of the statement, that through- out the East, probably with the exception of China, 23,840,000 people had fallen victims to the plague. As for this quarter of the globe, Hecker says-
" Of all the estimates of the number of lives lost in Europe, the most pro- bable is that altogether a fourth part of the inhabitants were carried off. Now if Europe at present contain 210,000,000 inhabitants, the population, not to take the higher estimate which might easily be justified, amounted to at least 105,000,000 in the fourteenth century. It may therefore be as- sumed without exaggeration that Europe lost during the Black Death 25,000,000 of inhabitants."
But the appalling nature of the calamity far transcended any estimate we could make of it if we took into account only the amount of mortality it directly produced. " The mental shock sustained by all nations during the prevalence of the Black Plague is without parallel and beyond description." From this cause arose a fearful train of moral, physical, and social disorders, exasperated for more than two centuries by misery, oppression, cruelty, ignorance, and fanaticism. The hideous processions of the Flagellants which had begun in the thirteenth century were everywhere renewed and multiplied in the fourteenth, and un- doubtedly promoted the spreading of the plague, whilst it is evi- dent that the gloomy fanaticism which gave rise to them would infuse a new poison into the already desponding minds of the people. The Jews were everywhere butchered without mercy, with impunity, and in the eyes of all the world, under the pre- tence that they had poisoned the waters and the air ; and what Boccaccio says of Florence may serve as a general description of the moral state of all Europe : " When the evil had become uni- versal, the hearts of all the inhabitants were closed to the feelings of humanity • . . . the influence and authority of every law, human and divine, vanished."
" The effects of the Black Death had not yet subsided, and the graves of millions of its victims were scarcely closed, when a strange delusion arose in Germany, which took possession of the minds of men, and, in spite of the divinity of our nature, hurried away body and soul into the magic circle of hellish superstition. It was a convulsion which in the most extraordi- nary manner infuriated the human frame, and excited the astonishment of contemporaries for more than two centuries, since which time it has never reappeared. It was called the dance of St. John or of St. Vitus, on account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it was characterized, and which gave to those affected, whilst performing their wild dance, and screaming and foaming with fury, all the appearance of persons possessed. It did not re- main confined to particular localities, but was propagated by the sight of the sufferers, like a demoniacal epidemic, over the whole of Germany and the neighbouring countries to the north-west, which were already prepared for its reception by the prevailing opinions of the times.
" So early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women were seen at Aix-la-Chapelle, who had come out of Germany, and who, united by one common delusion, exhibited to the public both in the streets and in the churches the following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in hand, and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then com- plained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack. This practice of swathing was resorted to on account of the tympany which followed these spasmodic ravings, but the by-standers fre- quently relieved patients in a less artificial manner, by thumping and trampling upon the parts affected. While dancing, they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out; and some of them afterwards asserted that they felt as if they had been immersed in a stream of blood, which obliged them to leap so high. Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open, and the Saviour en- throned with the Virgin Mary, according as the religious notions of the age were strangely and variously reflected in their imaginations. •
"A few months after this dancing malady had made its appearance at Aix-la-Chapelle, it broke out at Cologne, where the number of those pos- sessed amounted to more than five hundred, and about the same time at Metz, the streets of which place are said, to have been filled with eleven hundred dancers. Peasants left their 'ploughs, mechanics their workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels, and this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous disorder. Secret de- sires were excited, and but too often found opportunities for wild enjoy- ment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by vice and misery, availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a temporary livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and servants their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those possessed, and greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection. Above a hundred unmarried women were seen raving about in consecrated and unconsecrated places, and the consequences were soon per- ceived. Gangs of idle vagabonds, who understood how to imitate to the life the gestures and convulsions of those really affected, roved from place to place seeking maintenance and adventures, and thus, wherever they went, spreading this disgusting spasmodic disease like a plague; for in maladies of this kind the susceptible are infected as easily by the appearance as by the reality. At last it was found necessary to drive away these mischievous guests, who were equally inaccessible to the exorcisms of the priests and the remedies of the physicians. It was not, however, until after four months that the Rhenish cities were able to suppress these impostures, which had so alarmingly increased the original evil. In the mean time, when once called into existence, the plague crept on, and found abundant food in the tone of thought which prevailed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even, though in a minor degree, throughout the sixteenth and seven- teenth, causing a permanent disorder of the mind, and exhibiting, in those cities to whose inhabitants it was a novelty, scenes as strange as they were detestable."
The dancing mania in Germany was universally ascribed to demoniacal possession ; the kindred disease called Tarantism, which spread from Apulia over the other provinces of Italy, derived its name from the tarantula. This was a ground spider common in Apulia. Nobody had the least doubt that the disease was caused by its bite ; and the fear of the insect was so general that its bite was in all probability much oftener imagined, or the sting of some other insect mistaken for it, than actually received. Tarantism was a violent nervous disorder, which like that in Germany, found its crisis and natural cure in violent muscular exercise. It spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a wider range ; " and music, for which the inhabitants of Italy, now probably for the first time, manifested susceptibility and talent, became capable of exciting extatic attacks on those affected, and then furnished magical means of exorcising their melancholy." Tarantism long prevailed as an epidemic in Italy, and was at its greatest height there in the seventeenth century, long after the St. Vitus's Dance of Germany had disap- peared. It has declined more and more in modern times, and is now limited to single cases. A similar disease, called Tigretier, exists in Abyssinia, and has been described by an eye-witness, Nathaniel Pearce, in a work published in London in 1831. The period of the Black Death terminated in Russia, the last European country visited by it, in 1359 ; three centuries did not exhaust its sequelw. Putrid and other malignant epidemics raged throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ; among them were the English Sweating Sickness, of which there were five visita- tions between 1485 and 1551, the fourth extending over the north of Europe ; the Great Plague of London ; the Trousse- Galant, which in 1528 and the following years carried off a fourth part of the inhabitants of France ; the malignant spotted fever of the same period which extended throughout Italy, and destroyed the French army before Naples, and one-third of the people of Cremona ; and a multitude more, enumerated by Hecker in a chronological list. Has Dr. Cumming ever seen it, or ever con- descended to look into Dr. Hecker's pages ?
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