Carried from the steppes of Central Asia by freighter to modern day Italy, the bubonic plague – commonly known at the time as the Black Plague or Black Death – first reached the shores of England in 1348. Contemporary accounts from the era wager that up to fifty percent of Britain’s five million strong population fell to the unrelenting - and wholly misunderstood -pandemic.

Upon its arrival in Bristol, the bacterium quickly spread to Oxford and, then, onto London. Over the course of the next eleven years, English mass graves swelled with corpses, panic gripped the populace and doctors refused to treat to symptomatic patients out of fear for their own lives.

Initially, a government mandate ordered that any household suspected of harboring a plague victim would be subject to a forty-day quarantine that virtually guaranteed the deaths of any and all occupants within the same property. In England and across the continent, this policy was eventually extended to encompass whole towns and cities. It was a practice that did indeed yield survivors after such embargoes were lifted in population centers - though no provisions were ever undertaken taken to shield the unassuming public from the diseased rodents truly responsible for the ailment’s near global distribution.

Worldwide the Black Death would go on to kill untold millions. In aftermath of the mass fatalities, which eventually spread from the English Isles to China’s Pacific coast, where thirteen million are said to have perished, noted North African historian Ibn Khladun wrote, “It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out in the entire inhabited world.”

Though the first major systemic outbreak of plague ended in 1359, resurgences did crop numerous times in the ensuing years, decades and centuries. England itself would be fouled by two more waves of the Black Death - first in the 1650s and later in 1665. In that year, tailor George Viccars unwittingly infected his village of Eyam after receiving a shipment of tainted cloth. The practice of quarantine was soon resurrected and the town was closed off from the outside world for months. To the surprise of both physicians and locals, approximately fifty percent of the town’s populace managed to survive the ordeal.

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Meanwhile, in Italy, officials tried a more logical – or dastardly, depending on one’s charitable outlook - tactic. More than fifteen hundred plague victims were confined to one of the many small islands off the coast of Venice and, according to archaeologists responsible for excavating the site, it stands as the world’s first “lazaret” – a colony meant to cut off the source of an epidemic at its supposed source. The practice of relegating the contagious to a remote place would later live on into the 20th century in the form of the leper colony.

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