The Plague | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 18, 1875

The Plague.

ITS RE-APPEARANCE IN THE MARSHY DISTRICTS OF WESTERN ASIA—WILL IT SPREAD?

An old and very unwelcome visitant has made its appearance in the marshy districts between the Tigris and Euphrates. It is the old-fashioned plague, which, under the name of Black Death, destroyed in Europe, between 1348 and 1351, about 25,000,000 of people, Italy losing half of its inhabitants; Germany about 1,240,000 souls, and London alone 100,000 of its residents. In China, 13,000,000, and in the other countries of the east 24,000,000, persons are said to have fallen victims to this epidemic, which seems to have extended to Africa in the south and to Greenland in the north. No such destructive scourge had been known, and, as usual in the Middle Ages, the Jews in Europe were held responsible. It was said that they had poisoned the wells, and at Mayence 12,000 of them were massacred.

The plague has since spread into Europe at different periods, but its ravages have been confined to narrower limits. In 1576, Titian died from it at Venice. In 1665, it raged in London, nearly 70,000 having fallen victims to it. In 1720, not far from one-half the people of Marseilles were swept away, and, about 1790, it was very fatal in Russia and Poland. The later visitations of the plague have mainly been confined to the countries lying on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The disease is fatal in the majority of cases, death occurring in less than a week after the first attack. Nowhere have its symptoms been more faithfully and vividly described than in Defoe’s wonderful description of the plague-year in London, which is true to reality, though the basis of the narrative is imaginative.

About thirty years have elapsed since the last violent inroad of the plague into Egypt and Asia Minor. Its ravages in the former country are briefly, yet eloquently, portrayed in Kinglake’s Eothen. People were beginning to hope that it had died out, when in 1867 some cases appeared in the low and malarious districts of Mesopotamia. The spread of the disease was quite slow, and it did not attract much notice until the close of 1873. From that time until now cases have multiplied, and the area of infection has been widened. Some localities have suffered frightfully. The future alone can tell whether the malady will be confined to sections to which it appears almost endemic, or whether, as at former periods, it will overleap its limits and advance toward the civilized centers.

It may be aided, as are other diseases, by dirt and poverty, but, on the other hand, the channels through which infection may be spread are largely increased. Medical skill, as yet, has discovered no specific against it, and, like small-pox, which half a century ago seemed likely to be stamped out, it may be entering upon a new cycle of vigor. As yet there is no reason for alarm, but there certainly is need of watchfulness on the part of European officials and physicians. Travel in the east will doubtless grow into disfavor, and the quarantine regulations of the Mediterranean ports will be very vigorously enforced.—Cincinnati Gazette