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Written in French, Latin, and Middle English, these 800-year-old-plus texts contain a wealth of information about medical practices in the Middle Ages. The Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries project is scheduled to continue for two years, and will involve the cataloguing and digitalization of more than 180 medieval medical manuscripts that will be uploaded and made available to scholars and members of the public through the university’s online collection. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The Cambridge University Library has just launched an ambitious new initiative that will result in the public release of an extensive collection of manuscripts from medieval times. Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, “Plague,” Encyclopædia Britannica. “Black Death.” British History, Middle Ages. Opus Lilium medicinae inscruptum… Veneto, 1551. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980. Doctor Bernard de Gordon: Professor and practitioner. I do wonder if our scribe of 10a 249 made it through the pandemic.Įditors of Encyclopædia Britannica. It offers a fairly ‘modern’ view of the Black Death just as it was being experienced by its readers. The most characteristic sign, however, is the subsequent appearance of one or more tender, swollen lymph nodes, or buboes…” Īlthough Bernard completed Lilium in 1305, I find the Library’s copy to be so interesting as it is contemporary with the arrival of the Black Death in England. Symptoms of the bubonic plague start approximately 2-6 days after infection and include “shivering, then vomiting, headache, giddiness, and intolerance to light pain in the back and limbs and sleeplessness, apathy, or delirium. In some cities and towns, such as Avesbury, the dead were buried 20-60 a pit because of the rapid rate of infection and death. The Black Death was nearly always fatal those infected usually only lived for several days after symptoms appeared. The properties of the signs in the sick of a fever, that is, that the fever is pestilence, is that the heat is great outside & inside, and when he must tolerate ill-health, and when he has thirst and dryness of the tongue, and when breath is difficult, and when he has pain of the heart, and the stench comes from all of those things which are coming out from the body: breathing, sweating, vomiting, and urine.” When air is foggy and dense and it seems to be raining and not raining, and when the summer is hot and humid, and when birds leave their nests and eggs, and many reptiles appear on the ground, these are signs of a future epidemic. Signs of a future pestilence appear as stars called comets, with a round tail and a meteor, and the way in which it is hot and then cold, and then hot and then cold again, many times in one day. “Pestilential fevers are those that arrive in the time when crops are destroyed and all is barren because of corrupted air and water.The signs of which are common, and some belong to fever. Bernard de Gordon’s Lilium medicinae, 1348 (Oxford?). The following is a loose translation of a 1551 version of Lilium, from the second section of “Pestilential fevers.”Ĭap ix.
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Regardless of the cause, it was extremely infectious and caused upheaval for decades everywhere it hit.īernard de Gordon, in his Lilium medicinae, enumerates some signs of impending plague in the chapter entitled “Pestitential fevers.” Each chapter in Lilium is divided into 6 sections: the first included the definitions, names, and types the second, the causes the third, the diagnosis the fourth, the prognosis the fifth, the treatment and finally, the sixth – the clarification. Some evidence points to the Black Death being the plague, a fever caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis while other evidence suggests it was viral in origin. The death rate varied from region to region, but it is probably fair to say that it ranged from about 12% to 66% of the population.
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When the Black Death arrived in England in summer 1348, it had already hit China, middle Asia, the Crimea, and Sicily, and had begun moving inland to the rest of continental Europe.