myths of the plague

[akujin]

what myths are assoicated with the bubonic plague?

[andy hughes]

The belief that sneezing was a symptom, carrying a pomanda warded off the germs, and that if the red blotches met in a ring around the torso, death was near - all captured in the enduring nursery rhyme 'Ring-a-ring-a-roses'.

[rekstout]

Quack cures abounded from the not so bad (eating onions boiled in milk) to the positively revolting (applying the bloody end of a freshly halved pigeon to your buboes (the swellings).

[incitatus]

also the old slander that it was the jews/moslems/whoever poisoning the wells, that comets were "plague maidens" trailing infectious hair across the sky, that dancing could ward it off, that air rising from the ground caused it, that witches could not catch it....