Medieval medicine was powerless. It was strongly influenced by religion.

It dominated a vision of life in which fate, sin and influence of the stars blended.

The diseases were in fact charged to supernatural facts.

There were different remedies to the epidemics :

Ex voto to the Holy healers and forms of veneration for images and relics, processions and legacies.

Pilgrimages to the Holy Land or on the Path of Compostela or Rome.

Presence of charlatans and plague doctors, who used aromatic substances, spices, magic fragrances.

The position of a medieval doctor faced with Black Death was that of certainty that the air surrounding the infected area is at fault. Because the Plague would attack a particular region, kill off everyone within it, and then move on to an adjacent region, the circulating and moving air was blamed for the deaths.

Leper hospitals called “Lazzaretti” appeared in that time; the first organized form of hospital in history, which hosted the people afflicted by the infection, to separate them from the immune population.

ABOUT PLAGUE

There were two strains of the disease: the first, the bubonic plague, was communicated directly from rats or by fleas on them and on human beings. It symptoms were festering boils on the lymph nodes of the armpits and groins. Between thirty and sixty per cent of those who contracted the disease died. The second strain was the pulmonary plague. It was communicated by droplet infection and was in most cases fatal.