These orders, in correspondence with the spirit of the fourteenth
century, are sufficiently decided to indicate a recollection of
the good effects of confinement, and of keeping at a distance
those suspected of having plague. It was said that Milan itself,
by a rigorous barricade of three houses in which the plague had
broken out, maintained itself free from the "Great Mortality" for
a considerable time; and examples of the preservation of
individual families, by means of a strict separation, were
certainly very frequent. That these orders must have caused
universal affliction from their uncommon severity, as we know to
have been especially the case in the city of Reggio, may be easily
conceived; but Bernabo did not suffer himself to be deterred from
his purpose by fear--on the contrary, when the plague returned in
the year 1383, he forbade the admission of people from infected
places into his territories on pain of death. We have now, it is
true, no account how far he succeeded; yet it is to be supposed
that he arrested the disease, for it had long lost the property of
the Black Death, to spread abroad in the air the contagious matter
which proceeded from the lungs, charged with putridity, and to
taint the atmosphere of whole cities by the vast numbers of the
sick.
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