Epidemics before the sixteenth century
Mankind has been coping with an ever-emerging assortment of plagues since the beginning of recorded history, and the earliest record of a large-scale epidemic is in the Eberian papyrus of 4,000 BCE. Physiological and pathological explanations of the human body in that era were based on the four bodily fluids, and on this knowledge structure, most of the diseases were labeled as acute fevers or malarial fevers, and there would be no name associated with the cause of the disease. Galen, the famous Roman physician, mentioned at the beginning of the century that the Greek word loimos was used to denote any serious disease with a high mortality rate that infected many people at the same time, and could be understood as what is known in modern times as an infectious disease. Because of this, it is difficult to make judgments about ancient plagues.
According to medical historians, there were five large-scale disease pandemics in the Roman era; the plague that followed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79, which killed more than 10,000 people a day; a plague that followed a plague of locusts in 125, an infectious disease that killed more than 800,000; and a plague that occurred in the eastern part of the Roman empire in 164, which came to Rome two years later and spread rapidly in the surrounding area, a plague suspected to be adenomatosis. The plague, suspected to be adenomatous bubonic plague, put more than a thousand people a day on the road to nowhere in the city of Rome. In addition, two smallpox epidemics occurred in 251 and 312. The threat of death due to disease was almost uninterrupted during the Roman Empire, and the plague was destructive enough to destroy Rome and the Romans, becoming one of the factors that crippled the empire in its time of power.
The impact of infectious diseases on human life and the course of civilization is often ignored by historians, but the epidemics that ravaged the continent of Europe in the Middle Ages, the ravages of mankind is unprecedented, leprosy, bubonic plague, syphilis, etc., had plunged Europe into the abyss of horror, is another reflection of the dark Middle Ages.
In addition to infectious diseases, there is the "St. Anthony's Fire", scurvy and chorea, the pandemic of sweating sickness in England. As far as diseases are concerned, those prevalent in France are diphtheria, diarrhea, typhoid fever, pox, smallpox, typhus, poliomyelitis, "Dendu", scabies, whooping cough, scarlet fever, and influenza; and in England there are intermittent fevers, sweating sickness, atrophies, jaundice, consumption, epilepsy, dizziness, and so on.
The Black Death that shook the Middle Ages
Boccaccio and his Decameron are not only representative of the Renaissance, but also a classic work for historians and medical historians to understand the catastrophic plague that struck Europe in the fourteenth century, and which provides a detailed and accurate account of what has been called the Black Death that shook the Middle Ages.
The plague, which broke out in 1346, became known as the "Black Death."
Fear of the Black Death gripped Central Asia, Egypt, and nearly all of southern Europe from 1346 to 1347, then spread inexorably to Sicily, southern Italy, and southern France, and then to England, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom in 1349 and then to Russia in 1351-1352. 1352 and then to Russia, appearing in the Danube Valley in 1357 and again damaging Florence in 1359. Disease in the emergence, by turns, from weak to strong or from strong to weak, between 1439 and 1640, the medieval European trade of the important market in France, Besan?on had forty times the bubonic plague, Orléans was as many as twenty-two times, Seville was the center of the world at that time, suffered even worse, the bubonic plague thus continued until the eighteenth century before finally disappeared.
According to history, more than 100,000 people died in Florence in the 1348 disaster, 100,000 each in Venice and London, 50,000 in Paris, and 21,000 in Cologne in 1451. life expectancy in Europe shortened from 30 to 20 years in the 1350-1400 period. According to Richard FitzRalph, the president of Oxford University, the number of students dropped from 30,000 to fewer than 6,000 at that time.
The curtain fell on the Middle Ages when the bubonic plague spread unchecked across the continent. Neither bishops, nobles, merchants nor the poor could escape the slaughter of this plague, and the Black Death became the symbol of medieval death. This death that roamed the skies of medieval Europe led directly to certain structural changes in Europe, with a large number of priests dying of the disease, shaking the basic belief that the plague was God's punishment for sinners, and severely reducing the Church's spiritual control over the people. In the field of medicine, faith-based remedies were abandoned in favor of secular solutions to life-threatening problems, and research was urgently needed to combat the plague; the government enacted sanitary ordinances and regulations, and strict hygienic codes of urban life were introduced, effectively curbing the spread of disease.
Isolated hospitals, sanitary laws, seaport quarantine
At first, doctors were at a loss as to what to do about the plague. Boccaccio said, "No medicine can overcome or alleviate a disease without the advice of a physician." The power of medicine failed in the Middle Ages to deal with the ravages of infectious disease, when learned doctors tried to clean the plague-ridden air by advising the public to use strong odors to "fight fire with fire," leaving patients in toilets with empty stomachs to inhale the stench for hours. The main therapeutic techniques were still bloodletting, sucking, slashing or cauterizing abscesses with a blood-sucking device, or using figs and onions mixed with yeast to break open abscesses and treat them as ulcers. But these practices proved to be unhelpful.
Instead, European governments played an important role in dealing with the plague, and since the Black Death, the Guide to Health, which had been popular since the third century for personal protection against the plague, has focused instead on plague prevention and narrative. At the beginning of the epidemic, the Milanese authorities took strong measures to keep the city free of the plague for several months.
In 1374, Venice was the first city to issue a ban on all merchants, whether infected or suspected of being infected, and in 1377, the state of Ragusa*** on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea issued a rule for seafarers, which designated a landing place a considerable distance away from the city and the seaport, and all suspected of being infected with the plague must stay for 30 days in the air in a fresh and sunny environment before being allowed to enter the country. All those suspected of plague infection had to stay in the fresh air and sunny environment for 30 days before being allowed to enter the country, which was called Trentina, and later extended to 40 days, which was called Quarantenaria, which is our modern common term: harbor quarantine. 1383, Marseilles set up a special quarantine station for harbor quarantine. 1863, the Customs Infirmary in China was established, and the missionary doctor acted as the Customs Infirmary Officer responsible for making infectious diseases and epidemiological examinations for ships entering and exiting the harbors. In 1863, the Customs Infirmary was established in China, with missionary doctors acting as customs medical officers, responsible for examining ships entering and leaving the harbor for infectious diseases and epidemics. In the 1890s, when bubonic plague broke out in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, the Customs Medical Journal published reports on the prevalence, spread, and outbreak of the disease in various places.
The eleventh century in Europe has existed in the isolation of hospitals from the lepers of the transfer to accept the Black Death, the patient was settled in a designated place outside the city, the implementation of isolation, where the knowledge of people with the disease, that is, need to be notified. After the thirteenth century, the quarantine hospitals fell out of the jurisdiction of the Church, and municipal hospitals appeared.
In addition to this, the municipal government also laid down public health measures against the plague: all houses suspected of being infected were ventilated and fumigated, indoor furniture was disinfected by exposure to sunlight, and potentially infectious clothing and linens were burned, while streets and water sources were regulated.
In fact, the above measures are similar to those against leprosy, but human beings tend to be very forgetful, once the plague left, human beings began to dance and sing again, health and hygiene concepts, will soon be forgotten by human beings, back to the original way of life, when the disaster comes again, everything is destroyed, when human beings are helpless again, and will start from scratch, and constantly repeat the history. What makes this plague of the late Middle Ages so important in the history of mankind is the fact that the basic hygienic regulations and measures were fixed in the form of laws, and also good and practical hygienic and preventive concepts and measures. When the bubonic plague struck the continent again in the fifteenth century, the idea of community hygiene played a large part. This time the cities recovered quickly, and neither politics nor culture needed to devote more attention to the blight, while medicine grew in dealing with the plague.