I was a freshman in law school. In a few years I would be out in practice. I was well aware of the importance of the right kind of wife in furthering a lawyer’s career. The successful lawyers I had observed were, almost without exception, married to beautiful, gracious, intelligent women. With one omission, Polly fitted these specifications perfectly.Beautiful she was. She was not yet of pin-up proportions, but I felt that time would supply the lack. She already had the makings.

“Poisoning the Well ,” said Polly, “and stop shouting. I think shouting must be a fallacy too.”

I winced,but went bravely on. “First let us examine the fallacy called Dicto Simpliciter.”“By all means,” she urged, batting her lashes eagerly.“Dicto Simpliciter means an argument based on an unqualified generalization. For example: Exercise is good. Therefore everybody should exercise.”“I agree,” said Polly earnestly. “I mean exercise is wonderful. I mean it builds the body and everything.”“Polly,” I said gently, “the argument is a fallacy.Exercise is goodis an unqualified generalization. For instance, if you have heart disease, exercise is bad, not good. Many people are ordered by their doctorsnotto exercise. You mustqualifythe generalization. You must say exercise isusuallygood, or exercise is goodfor most people. Otherwise you have committed a Dicto Simpliciter. Do you see?”

Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute and astute—I was all of these. My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, precise as a chemist’s scales, as penetrating as a scalpel. And—think of it!—I only eighteen.

. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

In both types everything that issued from the body —breath, sweat, blood from the buboes and lungs, bloody urine, and blood-blackened excrement —smelled foul. Depression and despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and before the end “death is seen seated on the face.”

“demons in the shape of dogs

cardinals

Avignon

Beyond demons and superstition the final hand was God’s. The Pope acknowledged it in a Bull of September 1348, speaking of the “pestilence with which God is afflict-ing the Christian people.” To the Emperor John Cantacu-zene it was manifest that a malady of such horrors, stenches, and agonies, and especially one bringing the dismal despair that settled upon its victims before they died, was not a plague “natural”to mankind but “a chastisement from Heaven.” To Piers Plowman “these pestilences were for pure sin.”

The plague accelerated discontent with the Church at the very moment when people felt a greater need of spiritual reassurance. There had to be some meaning in the terroriz-ing experience God had inflicted. If the purpose had been to shake man from his sinful ways, it had failed. Human con-duct was found to be “wickeder than before,” more avari-cious and grasping, more litigious, more bellicose, and this was nowhere more apparent than in the Church itself. Clem-ent VI, though hardly a spiritual man, was sufficiently shaken by the plague to burst out against his prelates in a tirade of anger and shame when they petitioned him in 1351to abolish the mendicant orders. And if he did, the Pope replied, “What can you preach to the people? If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world, puffed up, pompous and sumptuous in luxuries. If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the benefices in the world are notenough for you. If on chastity —but we will be silent on this, for God knoweth what each man does and how many of you satisfy your lusts.” In this sad view of his fellow cler-ics the head of the Church died a year later. “When those who have the title of shepherd play the part of wolves,” said Lothar of Saxony, “heresy grows in the garden of the Church.” While the majority of people doubt-less plodded on as before, dissatisfaction with the Church gave impetus to heresy and dissent, to all those seeking God through the mystical sects, to all the movements for reform which were ultimately to break apart the empire of Catholic unity.

When death slowed production, goods became scarce and prices soared. In France the price of wheat increased fourfold by 1350. At the same time the shortage of labor brought the plague’s greatest social disruption —a con-certed demand for higher wages.

By a contrary trend, education was stimulated by con-cern for the survival of learning, which led to a spurt in the founding of universities. Notably the Emperor Charles IV, an intellectual, felt keenly the cause of “precious knowledge which the mad rage of pestilential death has stifled through-out the wide realms of the world.” He founded the Univer-sity of Prague in the plague year of 1348 and issued Impe-rial accreditation to five other universities — Orange, Peru-gia, Siena, Pavia, and Lucca —in the next five years. In the same five years three new colleges were founded at Cam-bridge — Trinity, Corpus Christi, and Clare — although love of learning, like love in marriage, was not always the motive. Corpus Christi was founded in 1352 because fees for celebrating masses for the dead were so inflated after the plague that two guilds of Cambridge decided to establish a college whose scholars, as clerics, would be required to pray for their deceased members

When it came to the plague, sufferers were treated by various measures designed to draw poison or infection from the body: by bleeding, purging with laxatives or enemas, lancing or cauterizing the buboes, or application of hot plas-ters. None of this was of much use. Medicines ranged, from pills of powdered stag’s horn or myrrh and saffron to po-tions of potable gold. Compounds of rare spices and pow-dered pearls or emeralds were prescribed, possibly on the theory, not [107] unknown to modem medicine, that a pa-tient’s sense of therapeutic value is in proportion to the ex-pense.

The apparent absence of earthly cause gave the plague a supernatural and sinister quality. Scandinavians believed that a Pest Maiden emerged from the mouth of the dead in the form of a blue flame and flew through the air to infect the next house. In Lithuania the Maiden was said to wave a red scarf through the door or window to let in the pest. One brave man, according to legend, deliberately waited at his open window with drawn sword and, at the fluttering of the scarf, chopped off the hand. He died of his deed, but his village was spared and the scarf long preserved as a relic in the local church.

The mystery of the contagion was “the most terrible of all the terrors,” as an anonymous Flemish cleric in Avignon wrote to a correspondent in Bruges. Plagues had been known before, from the plague of Athens (believed to have been typhus) to the prolonged epidemic of the 6th century A.D., to the recurrence of sporadic outbreaks in the 12th and 13th centuries, but they had left no accumulated store of understanding. That the infection came from contact with the sick or with their houses, clothes, or corpses was quickly observed but not comprehended. Gentile da Foligno, re-nowned physician of Perugia and doctor of medicine at the universities of Bologna and Padua, came close to respiratory infection when he surmised that poisonous material was “communicated by means of air breathed out and in.” Hav-ing no idea of microscopic carriers, he had to assume that the air was corrupted by planetary influences. Planets, how-ever, could not explain the ongoing contagion. The agonized search for an answer gave rise to such theories as transfer-ence by sight. People fell ill, wrote Guy de Chauliac, not only by remaining with the sick but “even by looking at them.” Three hundred years later Joshua Barnes, the 17th century biographer of Edward III, could write that the power of infection had entered into beams of light and “darted death from the eyes.”

The physical suffering of the disease and its aspect of evil mystery were expressed in a strange Welsh lament which saw “death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit! It is seething, terrible ... a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry ... a painful angry knob ... Great is its seething like a burning cinder ... a grievous thing of ashy color.”Its eruption is ugly like the “seeds of black peas, broken fragments of brittle sea-coal ... the early or-naments of black death, cinders of the peelings of the cockle weed, a mixed multitude, a black plague like halfpence, like berries ...” .

In a given area the plague accomplished its kill within four to six months and then faded, except in the larger cities, where, rooting into the close-quartered population, it abated during the winter, only to reappear in spring and rage for another six months.

The disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding, and was spread by contact; and a second, more virulent pneumonic type that infected the lungs and was spread by respiratory infection.