Pandemics, Plagues, and Pestilences

Historical Accounts of Pandemics, including “Journal of the Plague Year” by Daniel Defoe -- With multiple Illustrations

Before the most recent pandemic was the Great Plague -- the Black Death -- of the mid-17th century which claimed the lives of 200 million people in Europe and Asia, making it the most devasting such pandemic in human history. This account of that earlier pandemic by the classic author Daniel Defore (author of "Robinson Crusoe" and "Moll Flanders") was used for hundreds of years as a textbook account of the course of such a disease through a population. But that plague was not the first, as will be demonstrated by accounts of other pandemics, plagues, and pestilences, that have struck human civilization throughout history -- dating from the one that struck Athens in ancient times, and the plague of the 14th century in England. These Plagues wreaked havoc on the the societies of their time, caused the eruption of massive changes in economics, religion, politics, international relations, and even global climate. While this work does not provide that kind of macro-view of the long-term effects of this 17th-century pandemic, it does give us a glimpse of the 'ground-level' experiences of what it was like for people to live through the very worst calamities in recorded human history.