Here is a nice story, a tale of heroism and selflessnes, and a deeper look at the grace and kindness of humanity in the face of what was perhaps the greatest calamity ever to befall mankind. (I was asked to write something kind on the Blog; it pains me to do it)
The bubonic plague ravaged the villages, towns, and cities of Europe from 1348 - 1350. This was a disease that infected people via fleas (via rats) and took its toll swiftly, killing those infected in a period of days, or hours. It is believed this disease originated in the steppes of Asia, was transmitted to the Tartars, and was carried to Europe by Genoese sailors who traded (and made warfare) with them. Indeed, ships sailing into medieval ports in Sicily in 1348 were rife with men who were dead or dying. Those afflicted showed strange boils and blotches, and swellings known as "buboes" were open and seeping with pus or blood. These men were burning with high fever, their bodies were damp with sweat, and they were coughing up phlegm and blood.
This was a disease that moved quickly, and seemed to carry with it what people believed to be the wrath of an angry God. In 1347 the plague was in Genoa and Venice; by early 1348 it penetrated France; by the terrible hot summer of 1348 it had reached Rome, then Florence, and was teeming in England. The sheer number of people to die was staggering -- in cities it was recorded that 400 to 800 were dead every day; in the towns perhaps four out of five died; smaller villages were wiped out completely, some of them lost forever.
It is hard to imagine that kind of death; it is harder when you consider that people were dying too quickly for them to be buried. Graveyards were full, and streets were littered with rotting corpses. The church bells tolled endlessly... until there was no one left to actually ring them. The plague was highly transmittable through touch, and was even more virulent in its "pneumatic" (breath) form. People turned on each other, they abandoned friends, and even families deserted one another. A brother might leave his father, a husband his wife, a mother her child -- it was as if a man's heart had grown cold, and one person shunned another. (Boccacio)
So it is in this time that I give you the selfless nuns, in the "Hotel Dieu," in Paris.
These were the charitable women who kept to the tenets of their faith and took in, selflessly, victim after victim of the plague. People with purple-black skin and oozing sores would appear from the streets and the nuns would dutifully care for them... even when touching such a person meant certain death. Daily there were carts of people being taken to burial pits (or else left to be scattered in the streets) and the nuns were soon among them. It did not matter; they were constantly being replaced by newer members, by newer nuns who knew what their fate must be. They tended to the sick, cooled their fevers, washed them with water, and tried to dress the open, festering sores... even when it meant that they, too, might be dead within hours.
This was an act of bravery and kindess that stands out, momentarily, from the terrible dark pages of this time period. These women were able to care for strangers in a way that friends or even family did not. It is unthinkable to believe a mother would leave her child, or that a child would abandon his parents. These remarkable women were not afraid to show us that history is about humanity, and the ways we are compassionate and kind, and the stories we need to share.
(It so hurts me to be nice)