There were many different treatments advised at the time for people who had caught the plague. There were also precautions recommended for those who had not yet been infected. Below are some of the different pieces of advice.
1. Avoid breathing in germs when with a plague victim.
2. Sit next to a blazing fire
(as the Pope did right through the hot summer of 1348)
3. Live in a house sheltered
from the wind and keep the window closed.
4. Attack foreigners
and people of a different religion. Twenty thousand Jews were burned to
death in Strasbourg in 1348.
This is the burning of the Jews, from a 15th-Century German chronicle. Everyone suffered during the plague, but the Jews had to suffer the ferocity of their fellow men as well as the agony of plague.
Living in cleaner conditions than their neighbours, they were less vulnerable to the plague - which probably gave rise to the belief that they poisoned the wells of the Gentiles. This particular picture was used many times in different chronicles significant evidence of the widespread and continual persecution of the jews.
5. "The swelling should be softened with figs and cooked onions mixed with yeast and butter. When they are open they should be treated with the cure for ulcers. Towards the end of the plague. I developed a fever with a swelling in the groin. I was ill near on six weeks. When the swelling had ripened and had been treated in the way I prescribed. I escaped, by God's Grace".
Guy de Chauliac
6. Letter from King Edward III to the Lord Mayor of London 1349.
"You are to make sure that all the human excrement and other filth lying in the street of the city is removed. You are to cause the city to be cleaned from all bad smells so that no more people will die from such smells"
7. These people travelled about
whipping each other. They believed that the Black Death was God's punishment.
They punished themseves in order to beg God's forgiveness. They were called
flagellants.