This made my friday morning coffee about ten times better. I work on Victoria Street, right in front of Westminster Cathedral and find this extremely fascinating and at the same time intriguing. Next time I walk out for lunch, I'll keep an eye on the sites mentioned. Thanks for sharing!
"At this time, funeral processions and other public gatherings were also suspended in a futile attempt to stop the spread of plague"
Futile? Well, perhaps unsuccessful to stop the spread, but I can see how it could help.
I was surprised to see that they used methods to contain the plague that, although harsh, look somewhat effective to me, I thought they had no idea of what was going on.
Fascinating article. As an aside (note the name of the blog), does anyone know when the use of the word 'chirurgeon' migrated to the word 'surgeon' in English? The link below notes a reference from 1893.
It didn't, the roots of the word are from the Anglo-Norman word surgien ~900 years ago.
The similarities would be that both the German and the English words would share their roots in the latin chirurgia, which in turn comes from the Greek kheirourgia ‘handiwork, surgery’, from kheir ‘hand’ + ergon ‘work’
“In later Old French serurgien, contracted surgien, whence English sirurgien, surgien, now corruptly surgeon. The Renaissance brought back to French and English (partly also to Italian) the spelling chir-, but never to French the pronunciation with k, which has now established itself in English, largely because the word being no longer in popular use, the traditional pronunciation has yielded to a new one, founded immediately upon the Greek The original ending which would normally give modern chirurgian, was variously perverted in 16th cent., and finally settled down in its present form: compare surgeon n. The result of these successive re-formations and perversions is that the modern /kaɪˈrɜːdʒən/ is, strictly, a different word from Middle English /sɪˈrʊrdʒɪən/, though it would be difficult to draw a chronological line between the two.”
Hard to imagine what life was like in those times, where people died around you every day, you not knowing if you were next. Could this happen today? Even with our modern medicine and knowledge my local city (Dallas) almost had Ebola wind up in the general population.
