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. Now that it had resumed its milder form, so that it
infected only by contact, it admitted being confined within
individual dwellings, as easily as in modern times.

Bernabo's example was imitated; nor was there any century more
appropriate for recommending to governments strong regulations
against the plague that the fourteenth; for when it broke out in
Italy, in the year 1399, and still demanded new victims, it was
for the sixteenth time, without reckoning frequent visitations of
measles and small-pox. In this same year, Viscount John, in
milder terms than his predecessor, ordered that no stranger should
be admitted from infected places, and that the city gates should
be strictly guarded. Infected houses were to be ventilated for at
least eight or ten days, and purified from noxious vapours by
fires, and by fumigations with balsamic and aromatic substances.
Straw, rags, and the like were to be burned; and the bedsteads
which had been used, set out for four days in the rain or the