'Oh Father, Why Have You Abandoned Me?'

In 1347, chroniclers of the Black Death began reporting incidents of mothers, uncles, brothers and wives deserting their plague-stricken relatives and fleeing for their lives. Samuel Cohn tells the story of a horrifying, yet little known phenomenon: abandonment

In 1355, the Italian writer and poet Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a passage of text that – even at a distance of 650 years – is truly chilling. Describing the great plague that had ravaged Europe from the late 1340s, Bocaccio related that the pandemic “caused various fears and fantasies to take root in the minds of those who were still alive and well. And almost without exception,” he went on, “they took a single and very inhuman precaution, namely to avoid or run away from the sick and their belongings.”

What Boccaccio wrote next was more shocking still. “This scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases wives deserted their husbands,” he writes. “But even worse, and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.”

EXTREME SELF-LOATHING

The devastation wrought by the Black Death when it swept across Europe from 1347– c1351 was massive and unprecedented. Perhaps as many as a third of all Europeans lost their lives in a succession of ruinous outbreaks of plague. Such was the Black Death’s lethal power, it’s been estimated that it took the world population 200 years to recover to the level at which it stood in the early 1340s.

And this was a psychological calamity for the people of Europe, as well as a physical one. The trauma experienced by those who lived through the Black Death was extreme, and manifested itself in equally extreme ways – most notably in outbreaks of self-loathing and terrible violence.