![]() ![]() The latter remedy was said to be “so potent that, if a toad looked at it, its eyes would crack.” 5 Unfortunately for the desperate rich, ingesting gems and gold didn’t cure plague and may even have hastened their death.įrom fourteenth-century Italy, too, came ancient protocols for plague controclass="underline" lazarettos, or isolation hospitals named after Lazarus, the leprous beggar in the biblical parable and la quarantina, the quarantine of ships, originally set at forty days to commemorate Christ’s sojourn in the wilderness. ![]() ![]() One Italian apothecary named Gentile da Foligno crafted fanciful remedies from gemstones-including amethyst amulets and potions of powdered emerald. ![]() People drank infusions of treacle, wine, and minced snake, while the rich took costlier compounds of crushed pearls and molten gold. To ward off infected vapors, they prescribed smelling apples, molded from sandalwood, pepper, camphor, and rose. 4ĭoctors were powerless to halt the Black Death, but that didn’t inhibit their invention of strange nostrums. …ll that could conceal their distempers did it, to prevent their neighbors shunning and refusing to converse with them, and also to prevent authority shutting up their houses which, though it was not yet practised, yet was threatened, and people were extremely terrified at the thoughts of it. ![]()
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