Medicine: Plague No. 1

In the summer of 430 B. C. a plague which later historians took for typhus killed 300 Athenian knights, 45,000 Athenian citizens, 10,000 Athenian freemen. Survivors lost fingers, toes, eyesight, memory. Athenian life was completely demoralized.

Beginning in 540 A. D. and lasting some 50 years, another plague surged around the Mediterranean Sea. Deaths in Constaninople reached 10,000 a day.

In 1527, typhus accompanied the sack of Rome by Charles V's troops. Wrote Villa, an invading Spaniard: "In Rome no Dells sound; no church is open; no mass is read. There are...

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