16. What Did Medieval Folk Think Was the Best Remedy for the Black Death?
About a third of Europe’s population perished in the fourteenth century’s Black Death. The infected usually expired after a few days suffering horrific symptoms like bloody lungs, gruesome boils, severe vomiting, and high fevers that made victims delirious. Between the rapid spread, scary symptoms, and high mortality rates, people understandably panicked. Combine that with poor medical knowledge, and it is unsurprising that people latched on to any remedy, no matter how crazy. Such remedies seldom worked, and often only served to increase the victims’ suffering. Most cures were based on superstition, ignorance, and bad logic of the kind that put two and two together to come up with nine. An example is the line of reasoning that took people from figuring that some plague variants were airborne, and the solution: live in the sewers.
