From People Who Were There

• Plague is carried by “miasmic air”, so avoid the coast – miasmic air might waft off the sea.
• Avoid marshes and windy places for the same reason.
• Burn nice-smelling woods and plants to drive off the miasmic air: ash, juniper, musk, cyprus, laurel, rosemary.
• Likewise, fill your home with flowers.
• Bad smells also compete with and drive off miasmic air, so hang over the latrine and breathe deeply.
• Sprinkle rose-water and vinegar on the floor of your house.
• Carry around an apple – smell that.
• Live in a house that faces north.
• Avoid lepers – they are jealous and may try to poison you.
• Lie around – do not exercise. When you exercise, you breathe more heavily and will breathe more miasmic air.
• For this reason, definitely do not have sex, under any circumstances.
• Don’t sleep on your back.
• Don’t sleep after eating.
• Speaking of eating, don’t eat fish – they come from the miasmic sea.
• Don’t eat hard-boiled eggs.
• Don’t eat lettuce.
• If you must eat, mix ten-year-old treacle with wine and chopped snake – eat that.
• Grind an emerald into powder so strong that “if a toad looked at it, its eyes would crack” – eat that.
• If you must drink, mix a drink of lemon, rose-water, peppermint, and apple-syrup – drink that.
• Mix one ounce of gold with eleven ounces of quicksilver over heat, “let the quicksilver escape”, add forty-seven ounces of water of borage, store for three days over heat in an air-tight container, then drink that.
• Take an amethyst, etch onto it a picture of man bowing and holding a snake, its head in his right hand, and its tail in his left. Set the amethyst in a gold ring. Wear that.
• Definitely do not bathe.
• If you must wash, only wash your hands with vinegar or rose-water.
• Get bled – try to give eight pounds of blood.
• Even though everyone around you is dying, don’t get sad. This makes you more susceptible to the miasma.
• And above all, stay calm.

For all of the listed proscriptions, read Philip Ziegler’s The Black Death.

Image from wikipedia.