Genetic prophecy : beyond the double helix / Zsolt Harsanyi, Richard Hutton.

  • Harsanyi, Zsolt, 1944-
Date:
[1981], ©1981
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Genetic prophecy : beyond the double helix / Zsolt Harsanyi, Richard Hutton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    51/360 (page 35)
    The Enemy Changes reinforced by Procopius' observation that it was not uncom¬ mon for those about to be inflicted to see demons. The plague's future victims would lock themselves in their houses so that the agents of disease could not get at them. But such visions were actually early signs of illness; for them it was too late. The plague reached Italy and France; by the end of the sixth century, half the population of the Byzantine Empire had perished. Procopius wrote that in Constantinople the tale of the dead reached five thousand each day, and again it even came to ten thousand and still more than that. Some¬ how mankind survived. In 1338, the Black Death reappeared in Central Asia. Within a decade it had moved west to France and England. On April 27, 1348, a cantor visiting France wrote to his friends in Belgium: To put the matter shortly . . . more than a half of the people of Avignon are already dead. Within the walls of the city there are now more than 7,000 houses shut up; in there no one is living, and all who have inhabited them are departed; the suburbs contain hardly any people at all. The plague was vicious and insidious. It killed without mercy, leaving so many dead that the streets were foul with the smell of rotting bodies. It destroyed whole populations until there was practically nobody left alive to spread the disease. Then it would disappear, only to surface somewhere else. Between 1350 and 1600, it materialized some thirty sep¬ arate times in dozens of different places. And in 1655, it roared down upon London in a massacre that is known today as the Great Plague. The epidemic ravaged not only that city but the neighboring villages as well. London began to look like a ghost town as people fled. But no place was safe. The villagers of Eyam, a nearby community, saw their [ 35 ]