.. They generally died," he adds, "the third day
from the first appearance of the symptoms, without a fever or other
bad circumstance attending."
"It took men generally in the head and stomach, appearing first in
the groin," says Villani, "or under the armpits, by little knobs or
swellings called kernels, boils, blains, blisters, pimples, or
plague-sores; being generally attended with devouring fever, with
occasional spitting and vomiting of blood, whence, for the most part,
they died presently or in half a day, or within a day or two at the
most."
Less precise and minute is the description of the great surgeon,
Guido de Chauliac, who nobly stayed at Avignon for the six months
during which the visitation was at its worst; but he too mentions the
carbuncular swellings in the axillae and the groin, the purple spots,
and the violent inflammation of the lungs, attended by fatal
expectoration of blood.
As for the Emperor John Cantacuzene, his description is so flagrantly
a mere adaptation of the history of the plague at Athens by
Thucydides that it must be received with caution. It is only in what
it omits and in what it adds to the older narrative that it possesses
any great historic value. It agrees with the accounts quoted above in
making mention of the swellings, the blood-spitting, and the awful
rapidity with which the disease ran its course.
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