11. Body Collectors Persisted in a Society Literally Falling Apart
In a society primarily structured and run by religion, every idea you’ve held about an organization is failing. Priests are falling dead at an alarming rate and were often among the first victims of plague epidemics due to the practice of performing last rites. In some French monasteries, every single monk died. Bodies are piling up so fast they can’t be dealt with appropriately. It would likely have seemed like the end of the world to the people of the time.
Even worse, Boccaccio wrote that even family ties were not safe from the chaos and misery of the time. He wrote, “Brother was forsaken by brother, nephew by uncle, brother by sister… [and] what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate as if they had been strangers.” People, believing it to be the end times, only could not be bothered to hold to the norms of the time.
Despite the widespread panic and depression, body collectors kept faithfully at their work. While the world was quite possibly, in their eyes, collapsing into the apocalypse around them, their nightly calls of “bring out your dead” were still a constant in the afflicted cities. One cannot even imagine the bravery and resilience it must have taken to toil through such adversity and terror – especially in a society that frowned upon the very job they were doing.
