Friday 24 March 2023

the fault, dear brutus, is not in our stars (10. 633)

Far afield from the actual cause, on this day in 1345 noted surgeon and author of several treatises on the subject of hernias and cataracts well as the influential and widely-read Chirurgia Magna after Avicenna and Galen, Guy de Chauliac, observed a conjunction of Saturn, Mars and Jupiter in the House of Aquarius following a solar eclipse, which many took as an ominous portent and source of the outbreak of the Black Death that hit pandemic levels three years later. For his part, the resident physician of Paris and Montpellier, chiefly deriving his knowledge from the embalming the cadavers of dead popes during the Avignon Captivity, chose to remain during the pandemic outbreak whist other doctors fled, importantly documenting the difference between the Bubonic and Pneumonic Plague, discouraging social contact and attempting to disabuse people from assigning blame to heretics and the Jewish population, whom many accused of poisoning well water, and accept this superstitious coincidence.