Not only now during the corona crisis is a contagious disease disrupting life. This also happened in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Plague, a deadly and highly contagious disease, dominated here for almost the entire century. How did people react at the time?
A stranded sperm whale! This could only mean misery. The seventeenth-century people saw the sperm whale on the beach of Beverwijk in 1601 as a bad omen. Just like the solar eclipse in the same year, which can also be seen in the engraving by Jan Saenredam. Death shoots its arrows at the city maiden Amsterdam. And yes, in that same year the plague broke out in several Dutch cities, including Amsterdam.
Hasty illness
The seventeenth century is best known as our Golden Age. With cultural wealth due to famous painters and scientists, such as Rembrandt and Boerhaave, and material wealth and power through overseas trade. Less well-known is that the plague was such a common disease that easily killed ten percent of city residents per outbreak. Especially in the big cities it was often hit, in Amsterdam for example 23 times, until the plague disappeared from our country at the end of the seventeenth century.
The disease had been in Europe since the fourteenth century, arriving by ships from the east in the busy trading cities of southern Europe. With the growing activity in Dutch cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the number of outbreaks and infected towns and villages increased considerably. How did people experience this threat? Diaries and letters provide an insight into the experience of the past.
Death was already a lot more present in daily life then than it is now. Child mortality was high, there were no antibiotics yet, so a simple infection could mean the end of this century, and the Netherlands were at war on their own territory for half of this century. However, these causes of death were all foreseeable and foreseeable, no matter how sad. The plague was a different story.
Out of nowhere the plague appeared and within a day it could have happened. It wasn't called the hasty disease for nothing. A woman wrote to her sister in 1655 about how the plague swept through Amsterdam:'The disease is spreading everywhere on the Oudezijds, where entire families have died out. In the Bloemstraat, where our brother Abraham lives, 27 people had died the day before yesterday and today in the Anjeliersstraat 22. Three residents from one house were buried in the Barndesteeg yesterday.'
Prevention is better than cure
There was no cure for the plague, but there were ways to prevent you from getting sick. In theory then. At bad omens, such as the stranding of a sperm whale, pastors called on the population to stop their sinful way of life, go to whores, drink and play dice. Otherwise God might punish the whole city. However, the plague as the ultimate punishment, which would spare few, did not only come from the clergy.
Doctors agreed, but they also believed that the plague could spread through tainted air, miasma. This theory has been around since ancient times. It is also not surprising that this was thought. From the crowded churches, where the corpses were piled up for burial, and from the slums, reeking fumes rose. To combat this filthy and dangerous air, city councils had burning tar barrels installed.
In addition to a better lifestyle and fighting bad air, there was another way to avoid getting sick:you should not let yourself be disturbed. Once paralyzed by the situation, you were more susceptible to the plague. The doctor Willem Swinnas from Brielle, for example, was convinced that his patient died in 1664 because of her fear of the plague. She had drunk beer that turned out to come from the house of a plague sufferer. When she found out, she was so shocked that she developed an acute fever. In a total panic, she was unable to administer the prescribed medication and died a few days later. And she was far from the only one who panicked. For example, several plague sufferers jumped in panic in the Amsterdam canals during the epidemic of 1624.
Number of casualties
Most of the victims were in the large cities of that time, such as Amsterdam, Leiden and Rotterdam. And to think that the dead were not spread out over the whole year, but died within a short time. If we look at Leiden in 1655, where 125 deaths per month was a normal death rate, 8365 inhabitants died from the plague between August and October. That is 1 in 8 Leiden residents, since the population was around 64,000 people. If you compare that with the number of inhabitants now, that would mean more than 15,000 Leiden victims within three months.
Large cities not only had the highest percentage of victims, but also the most plague outbreaks. Sometimes the disease even came back every year. The enormous fear that must have caused the first signs of a plague outbreak is hard to imagine. It is not for nothing that letter writers from that time often mention the incomprehensible numbers of plague victims. In September 1664 an Englishman wrote from Amsterdam to his brother in London that there were more than a thousand victims that week and how afraid he was that this number would only increase the following week. The man was not exaggerating.
Amsterdam and Leiden have had the most plague outbreaks, but many victims also fell outside Holland. For example, Ysbrand van Diemerbroeck, the city doctor of Nijmegen, wrote about the terrible scenes in his city during the plague epidemic of 1636. Here too, several victims regularly fell in a single house. The biers were piled up against the houses, the dead were carried to their funeral from all sides and the soldiers would drop dead in the street.
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Most of the casualties were in the city, although not every resident had an equal chance of getting sick. The rich could hide in their canal houses and city palaces and after country houses became fashionable in the second half of the century, they fled the city. The poor, on the other hand, had nowhere to go. They lived packed in narrow alleys, with whole families in small rooms. Here the best conditions prevailed for the pneumonic plague, which is highly contagious via saliva, which you could succumb to within a day, and for the rats, which spread the bubonic plague through their fleas. The poor, overcrowded neighborhoods were therefore the most victims.
A dead person in every family
In addition to fear, there was also a lot of sadness, because everyone lost loved ones, relatives or friends to the plague. The famous preacher Arminius wrote in 1602 that he could not see the fate of all those people without emotion. Hoorn in West Friesland, an important trading city in the seventeenth century, suffered an outbreak eleven times between 1600 and 1665. In 1652 the entire city was plunged into mourning, 'as there was hardly any family who had a father or mother, sister or brother, uncle, or cousin. It was with us just as in the days of Pharaoh:there was not a house where there was no mourning dead.” This is a reference to the Old Testament, in which God bombarded the Egyptian Pharaoh with ten plagues because he did not set the Israelites free. want to let. The seventeenth-century man therefore saw the hand of God in the plague outbreaks in his own time.
All these dead had to be buried and people wanted a normal burial as best they could. Traditions surrounding the farewell offer something to hold on to and are important for accepting and coping with someone's death, especially in times of an epidemic with feelings of fear and powerlessness. When that possibility disappears, the chance of emotional outbursts is high. In Nijmegen, for example, women were at each other's throats to get their hands on dead bars that had become scarce, which had to carry the coffins. City authorities were therefore afraid of riots during funerals, and the funeral processions had to take the shortest possible route to the final resting place.
Bundles of straw as a warning
The plague spread quickly and seemed very contagious, but the seventeenth-century people didn't quite understand how. They knew it was better to stay away from plague sufferers and their homes and workplaces. Workshops were not allowed to be entered for several weeks and a bunch of straw was hung on houses as a warning. The effect of these bunches of straw was so great that in times without plague, Leiden straw traders were not allowed to hang bunches from their shops:the people of Leiden were shocked.
It is also this isolation that would ultimately cause death rates to decline. The sick were housed in hospitals or special plague houses on the outskirts of the city, to avoid contamination with the rest of the inhabitants. Ships from areas affected by the plague were no longer allowed to dock in the Dutch ports. Conversely, foreign cities refused Dutch ships from the 1950s in times of plague outbreaks. The Italian city of Piacenza even imposed the death penalty on trade in Amsterdam goods in 1663 and anyone who had even been near Amsterdam was refused entry to the city.
Not unjustly, since Amsterdam was hit by a major plague outbreak that year. Domestic traders also avoided the city:after the rumor of 800 dead Amsterdam victims a day had reached Groningen, no one there dared to travel to the Damstad anymore. In response, the canal city published a pamphlet in which they firmly denied this rumor.
In the Netherlands, pest control had long been a local affair. But because of the boycott of countries with a stronger central authority, such as France, the States of Holland got involved. They sent the French king Louis XIV a letter stating – not truthfully – that everything was not so bad in Holland with the plague and that only in Amsterdam there were more deaths than usual. Fearing an economic crisis, they also issued health certificates for skippers and traders, stating that there was no plague in the place of origin.
At the end of the seventeenth century, fighting pests and boycotting people and ships from risk areas would even become a 'national' affair for the States General. And with success, it seems. The plague still regularly returned in other parts of the world, but no longer in the Netherlands. But whether the policy was the only reason for this, the scientists are still not in agreement.