Bubonic Plague was an ongoing epidemic that sickened and killed many in Europe and beyond beginning in the mid-fourteenth century and continuing in the days of Martin Luther's sixteenth-century Germany. The pneumonic form of the disease was particularly dangerous because it entered the lungs and was spread by coughing. When this happened the fatality rate was nearly 100%. Martin Luther's treatise on whether one may flee when plague strikes was prompted by a request from the clergy of Breslau, who wondered whether a Christian could flee home and labors on account of the plague. Luther's pragmatic response focused on a Christian's responsibility to care for the sick and to use the means God gives to limit the plague's destruction. He lauded those who can face the plague without fear of death, but he emphasized that those with "weak faith" can flee in good conscience as long as they are not needed to care for someone or to maintain a public service. Luther used the occasion for the treatise to talk about the need for hospitals and public cemeteries outside the city center. Anna Marie Johnson introduces Luther's treatise and provides insightful annotations to help the reader understand Luther's text and his sixteenth century context. The parallels to the recent Covid pandemic and other epidemic diseases are striking. Though science and medicine have advanced greatly today, questions of ethical responsibilities are still with us, and Christians continue to wonder what faithful responses to pandemic should be.

With sixteenth century Germany experiencing the ravages of the Bubonic Plague, Martin Luther was asked to comment on whether Christians could flee home and labors on account of the plague. Anna Marie Johnson introduces and comments on Luther's 1527 treatise "Whether One May Flee the Deadly Plague," still surprisingly relevant with the pandemic.

The Black Death of the late Middle Ages is often described as the greatest natural disaster in the history of humankind. More than fifty million people, half of Europe’s population, died during the first outbreak alone from 1347 to 1353. Plague then returned fifteen more times through to the end of the medieval period in 1500, posing the greatest challenge to physicians ever recorded in the history of the medical profession. This engrossing book provides the only comprehensive history of the medical response to the Black Death over time. Leading historian John Aberth has translated many unknown plague treatises from nine different languages that vividly illustrate the human dimensions of the horrific scourge. He includes doctors’ remarkable personal anecdotes, showing how their battles to combat the disease (which often afflicted them personally) and the scale and scope of the plague led many to question ancient authorities. Dispelling many myths and misconceptions about medicine during the Middle Ages, Aberth shows that plague doctors formulated a unique and far-reaching response as they began to treat plague as a poison, a conception that had far-reaching implications, both in terms of medical treatment and social and cultural responses to the disease in society as a whole.

This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies, and travelers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.

The year is 1665 and the plague has come to the city of London. For Henry Harper, apprentice apothecary, life will never be the same. His father has died of the plague, and his mother and brother have fled to the country. Now Henry is alone and must find a way to escape from the city he loves, before he, too, is struck down ... (From back cover).

Read Jeff Carlson's blogs and other content on the Penguin Community. View our feature on Jeff Carlson's Plague Year.The nanotechnology was designed to fight cancer. Instead, it evolved into the Machine Plague, killing nearly five billion people and changing life on Earth forever. The nanotech has one weakness: it self-destructs at altitudes above ten thousand feet. Those few who've managed to escape the plague struggle to stay alive on the highest mountains, but time is running out-there is famine and war, and the environment is crashing worldwide. Humanity's last hope lies with a top nanotech researcher aboard the International Space Station-and with a small group of survivors in California who risk a daring journey below the death line...