In Germany there was a repetition in every respect of the same
phenomena. The infallible signs of the oriental bubo-plague with
its inevitable contagion were found there as everywhere else; but
the mortality was not nearly so great as in the other parts of
Europe. The accounts do not all make mention of the spitting of
blood, the diagnostic symptom of this fatal pestilence; we are
not, however, thence to conclude that there was any considerable
mitigation or modification of the disease, for we must not only
take into account the defectiveness of the chronicles, but that
isolated testimonies are often contradicted by many others. Thus
the chronicles of Strasburg, which only take notice of boils and
glandular swellings in the axillae and groins, are opposed by
another account, according to which the mortal spitting of blood
was met with in Germany; but this again is rendered suspicious, as
the narrator postpones the death of those who were thus affected,
to the sixth, and (even the) eighth day, whereas, no other author
sanctions so long a course of the disease; and even in Strasburg,
where a mitigation of the plague may, with most probability, be
assumed since the year 1349, only 16,000 people were carried off,
the generality expired by the third or fourth day.
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