Epidemics: black death terror in Florence, 1348 – by Giovanni Boccaccio – psychiatry in literature

Among survivors, comparable herd responses recur in the context of our COVID-19 pandemic:a ‘Some […] conceived that to live moderately was the best defence [and they] shut themselves up in those houses where none had been sick […];and there, using […] the most delicate viands and the finest wines and eschewing all incontinence, they abode with music and such other diversions as they might have, never suffering themselves to speak with any nor choosing to hear any news from without of death or sick folk. [...]leaving be that townsman avoided townsman and that well nigh no neighbour took thought unto other and that kinsfolk seldom or never visited one another and held no converse together save from afar, this tribulation had stricken such terror to the hearts of all, that brother forsook brother, uncle nephew and sister brother and oftentimes wife husband;nay (what is yet more extraordinary and well-nigh incredible) fathers and mothers refused to visit or tend their very children’. Be that as it may, ‘weary of going wandering so long among such miseries’, Boccaccio then recounts 100 life-affirming tales told over ten nights by seven young women and three young men self-isolating in a hill-top palace outside Florence … a. The Decameron of Giovanni Bocaccio, Translated by John Payne.