A “Citizens’ Health Committee,” made up of thecity’s most prominent leaders and appointed by the mayor,backed Blue’s strategy: By inspection, identify rat refugesand destroy them; remodel housing and commercial proper-ties to eliminate potential rat refuges; trap, poison, andslaughter rats as well as autopsy them to determine the prev-alence of plague-infected animals; and identify and isolatehuman cases of plague. Blue was indefatigable and, by theend of 1909, plague had disappeared from San Francisco.Yet, a sinister consequence of the epidemic had been discov-ered: Plague had spread widely in the ground squirrel popu-lation of northern California, where it remains endemictoday!

On April 18, 1906, the city was devastated by a greatearthquake followed by a destructive fire. Chase documentsthe disaster graphically. Hundreds of thousands were madehomeless. Hastily organized refugee camps struggled toprovide a minimum of life support necessities. Amidst thischaos, it was no surprise that rats thrived, and with them theplague returned.

It was only whenpressure from a number of state health departments threat-ened a quarantine of California and a new governor waselected to replace Gage that an intensified control programwas implemented under the direction of Kinyoun’ssuccessor, Rupert Blue.

The Barbary Plague chronicles the bubonic plagueepidemics of 1900–1904 and 1907–1908 in San Francisco.

when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another

Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

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.

Perchance he for whom this bell1 tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him;

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 largest cities of Europe, with populations of about 100,000, were Paris and Florence, Venice and Genoa. At the next level, with more than 50,000, were Ghent and Bruges in Flanders, Milan, Bologna, Rome, Naples, and Palermo, and Cologne. London hovered below 50,000, the only city in England, except York with more than 10,000. At the level of 20,000 to 50,000 were Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Marseille, and Lyon in France, Barcelona, Seville, and Toledo in Spain, Siena, Pisa, and other secondary cities in Italy, and the Hanseatic trading cities of the Empire.

As Langland wrote, God is deaf now-a-days and deigneth not hear us, And prayers have no power the Plague to stay

Below in a scene of extraordinary verve a hunting party of princes and elegant ladies on horseback comes with sud-den horror upon three open coffins containing corpses in different stages of decomposition, one still clothed, one half-rotted, one a skeleton. Vipers crawl over their bones. The scene illustrates “The Three Living and Three Dead,” a13th century legend which tells of a meeting between three young nobles and three decomposing corpses who tell them, “What you are, we were. What we are, you will be.” In Traini’s fresco, a horse catching the stench of death stiffens in fright with outstretched neck and flaring nostrils; his rider clutches a handkerchief to his nose. The hunting dogs recoil, growling in repulsion. In their silks and curls and fashion-able hats, the party of vital handsome men and women stare appalled at what they will become.

In Basle on January 9, 1349, the whole community of several hundred Jews was burned in a wooden house espe-cially constructed for the purpose on an island in the Rhine, and a decree was passed that no Jew should be allowed to settle in Basle for 200 years. In Strasbourg the Town Coun-cil, which opposed persecution, was deposed by vote of the guilds and another was elected, prepared to comply with the popular will. In February 1349, before the plague had yet reached the city, the Jews of Strasbourg, numbering 2,000, were taken to the [114]burial ground, where all except those who accepted conversion were burned at rows of stakes erected to receive them.

n Messina, where the plague first appeared, the people begged the Archbishop of neighboring Catania to lend them the relics of St. Agatha. When the Catanians refused to let the relics go, the Archbishop dipped them in holy water and took the water himself to Messina, where he carried it in a procession with prayers and litanies though the streets. The demonic, which shared the medieval cosmos with God, ap-peared as “demons in the shape of dogs” to terrify the peo-ple. “A black dog with a drawn sword in his paws appeared among them, gnashing his teeth and rushing upon them and breaking all the silver vessels and lamps and candlesticks on the altars and casting them hither .and thither .... So the peo-ple of Messina, terrified by this prodigious vision, were all strangely overcome by fear.

When it became evident that [104]these processions were sources of infection Clement VI had to prohibit them.

Rumors of a terrible plague supposedly arising in China and spreading through Tartary (Central Asia) to India and Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and all of Asia Minor had reached Europe in 1346.

Again Pope Clement attempted to check the hys-teria in a Bull of September 1348 in which he said that Christians who imputed the pestilence to the Jews had been “seduced by that liar, the Devil,” and that the charge of well-poisoning and ensuing massacres were a “horrible thing.

Usually Death was personified as a skeleton with hour-glass and scythe, in a white shroud or bare-boned, grinning at the irony of man s fate reflected in his image: that all men, from beggar to emperor, from harlot to queen, from ragged clerk to Pope, must come to this. No matter what their poverty or power in life, all is vanity, equalized by death. The temporal is nothing; what matters is the after-life of the soul

Clement VI found it necessary to grant remis-sions of sin to all who died of the plague because so many were unattended by priests. “And no bells tolled,” wrote a chronicler of Siena, “and nobody wept no matter what his loss because almost everyone expected death.... And people said and believed, ‘This is the end of the world’.

A third of Europe would have meant about 20 million deaths. No one knows in truth how many died. Contempo-rary reports were an awed impression, not an accurate count. In crowded Avignon, it was said, 400 died daily; 7,000 houses emptied by death were shut up; a single graveyard received11,000 corpses in six weeks; half the city’s inhabi-tants reportedly died, including 9 cardinals or one third of the total, and 70 lesser prelates

t seemed as if one sick person “could infect the whole world.”