In what annals has it ever been read that houses were left vacant, cities deserted, the country neglected, the fields too small for the dead and a fearful and universal solitude over the whole earth?… Oh happy people of the future, who have not known these miseries and perchance will class our testimony with the fables.Petrarch
The medieval Italian poet Petrarch, describing the onslaught of the Black Death in 1348, was prescient. Today, we can’t imagine its lived reality. To sense what the Black Death was really like, you have to imagine that a third of the people you know, or of the human beings you can see walking down the street, suddenly vanish. The known world with a third fewer of its people within a span of six years is unthinkable. And it happened only once in history.
During the onslaught, there’d be no place to bury all the bodies; people would lie abandoned in the street, or curled up on the sidewalk, choking for air until they died. You’d meet a friend for lunch; by nightfall he’d be dead, dining with his ancestors in Paradise, as the Italian poet Boccaccio put it. You would never know whom the arrow would strike next – your wife, your children, your friends, your parents, or you yourself. A large, exquisitely painful swelling might erupt under your arm or in your groin, or – worse – you might feel well one minute and the next start spitting blood. And that blood-spitting was always fatal.
from: Aeon
