Next Week Is Plague Week at Retrospectacle

Hear ye, hear ye! To all those curious about the mysteries of the Plague, next week I will be blogging something about the Plague every day. To get a whiff of where I'm going with this, check out my post Coffee as A Treatment for the Plague.

If you've got anything you'd like researched, or interesting questions about the plague, leave them in the comments!

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I don't really know much about the plague, but I guess a question I have is was it really called the plague when it happened, or what other nomenclature was used to describe it?

Similar to Bryce, I know nothing about the plague that I didn't learn from Peter Bruegel (and, umm, medical school), and am curious about the etymology of the word. What I'd like to know is when did plague come to mean "harassment with minor annoyances" in addition to / rather than "massive suffering and torment of a hysterical, god-forsaken people" Is this just natural linguistic drift, a by-product of our relative prosperity or the godless atheism of our days, or what?

I recently heard that there is some doubt now that the Black Death may not have been bubonic plague. The doubt based on the speed of transmission, but no alternate disease was mentioned. Is there any other disease that matches the symptoms that could be a likely alternative?

What remedies etc were used to ward off the plague and did any of them actually work?