This deadly disease came from Asia.  It is said to have originated in China, spreading over the great continent westwardly, and descending in all its destructive virulence upon Europe, which continent it swept as with the besom of destruction.  The disease appears to have been a very malignant type of what is known as the plague, a form of pestilence which has several times returned, though never with such virulence as on that occasion.  It began with great lassitude of the body, and rapid swellings of the glands of the groin and armpits, which soon became large boils.  Then followed, as a fatal symptom, large black or deep-blue spots over the body, from which came the name of “Black Death.”  Some of the victims became sleepy and stupid; others were incessantly restless.  The tongue and throat grew black; the lungs exhaled a noisome odor; an insatiable thirst was produced.  Death came in two or three days, sometimes on the very day of seizure.  Medical aid was of no avail.  Doctors and relatives fled in terror from what they deemed a fatally contagious disease, and the stricken were left to die alone.  Villages and towns were in many places utterly deserted, no living things being left, for the disease was as fatal to dogs, cats, and swine as to men.  There is reason to believe that this, and other less destructive visitations of plague, were due to the action of some of those bacterial organisms which are now known to have so much to do with infectious diseases.  This particular pestilence-breeder seems to have flourished in filth, and the streets of the cities of Europe of that day formed a richly fertile soil for its growth.  Men prayed to God for relief, instead of cleaning their highways and by-ways, and relief came not.

Such was its character, what were its ravages?  Never before or since has a pestilence brought such desolation.  Men died by millions.  At Basle it found fourteen thousand victims; at Strasburg and Erfurt, sixteen thousand; in the other cities of Germany it flourished in like proportion.  In Osnabrueck only seven married couples remained unseparated by death.  Of the Franciscan Minorites of Germany, one hundred and twenty-five thousand died.

Outside of Germany the fury of the pestilence was still worse; from east to west, from north to south, Europe was desolated.  The mortality in Asia was fearful.  In China there are said to have been thirteen million victims to the scourge; in the rest of Asia twenty-four millions.  The extreme west was no less frightfully visited.  London lost one hundred thousand of its population; in all England a number estimated at from one-third to one-half the entire population (then probably numbering from three to five millions) were swept into the grave.  If we take Europe as a whole, it is believed that fully a fourth of its inhabitants were carried away by this terrible scourge.  For two years the pestilence raged, 1348 and 1349.  It broke out again in 1361-62, and once more in 1369.