Learning about the Black Death striking in the 14th century, we have seen that people were deprived of any knowledge concerning the plague. Its origins and the way it spread remained sources of questioning and anxiety, and the only answer provided was religion. It was God’s anger that was reflected on the ongoing disasters. From the Plague of Athens 429-426 BCE to the Black Death, all diseases invading the world were considered coming from God’s wrath. Unaware of its contagious characteristics, people would gather, pray and sing together, worsening the situation, creating innumerable clusters.
However, as seen in the Journal of the Plague Year, people seemed to have a different reaction to the plague in the 17th century. Daniel Defoe mentions people preferring the countryside to the city, knowing that an urbanized and highly-populated environment was favoring the spread of the disease, and the narrator describes the empty streets of London: something unimaginable during the Black Death’s outbreak in the 14thcentury.
Paul Slack in Responses to Plague in Early Modern Europe explains this by saying that the derivative diseases spreading after the Black Death were of “comparatively modest dimensions: and they thus gave people an opportunity to observe the disease in operation more coolly than they could in major crises” (p. 435), which led to a “studied refusal to contemplate them (diseases), or at least a denial of their existence for as long as possible”. The ban of movement of goods started in the 14th century, and its development increased in sophistication over the centuries. It is only in the 18th century that the implementation of “cordons sanitaires” was introduced, meaning a general quarantine for a city particularly struck by the plague, as it happened in Marseilles in 1720. Governments were taking drastic actions and controlling the importation and exportations of goods even more thoroughly. Ships arriving from Africa and highly-infected areas on the Mediterranean coast were refused entry or forced to isolate: the freedom or travelling and trading without any restrictions was considered a cause of the plague occurring in Marseilles in 1720. Pesthouses were introduced where the sick would stay together, big congregations were banned, funerals were reduced to a very small number of people, whole cities would organize quarantines in order to reduce the spread of the unstoppable bacteria.
Here are two illustrations of the plague happening in Marseilles in 1720. Both painters seem to underline that it was coming from ships docking Marseilles’ port, one of the biggest of the world at the time.
A video explaining the origins of the plague in Marseilles.
Overall, there was a general understanding of the infectiousness of the plague and the way it spread. Governments necessarily increased their power to implement new rules in order to protect populations. The scientific progress and the passing of years allowed the populations to draw correlations on the measures taken and the number of deaths. Pragmatic thinking and time improved the reaction to the plague immensely.
Bibliography:
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1534/reactions-to-plague-in-the-ancient–medieval-world/
https://historydaily.org/death-ships-everything-about-ships-that-brought-plague-europe
SLACK, P. (1988). Responses to Plague in Early Modern Europe: The Implications of Public Health. Social Research, 55(3), 433-453. Retrieved February 5, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970513
Defoe Daniel. “ A Journal of the Plague Year.”E.Nutt at the Royal – Exchange; J. Roberts in Warwick-lane; A. Dodd without Temple-Bar; and J.Graves in St. Jame’s – street. 1722