mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
dripping with feverish sweat, staggering in pain, and covered with black
boils were not allowed to enter. But in June a Neapolitan fisherman
made it into Rome, where, feeling ill, he went to the Hospital of Saint
John. Within hours black boils appeared, and within days he died. No
one knew how many Romans the sick fisherman had infected with his
miasmas. Plague had hit Rome.
The Roman authorities immediately sequestered large buildings located
away from the bulk of the population in which to immure plague
victims, keeping them separated from those who remained healthy.
Called lazarettos after Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead,
each hospital had hundreds of beds and a staff of doctors and nurses to
attend to them. One lazaretto was for the ill and dying; another for
those thought to be recovering; and a third for travelers waiting outside
the gates of Rome for a health certificate before they were permitted to
enter. Although the incubation period of bubonic plague is only three to
six days, seventeenth-century doctors insisted on a quarantine of twentytwo
days, just to be sure.
Two lazarettos were outside the city of Rome and another was on an
island in the Tiber, a convent requisitioned from nuns. In the lazarettos,
doctors fortified the sick with meat and eggs, along with special concoctions
of hot chickpea juice. The most important step to save the sick
was to pop the buboes—black abscesses the size of lemons or oranges
that formed in the armpits and groins of the victims and contained
foul-smelling seedlike structures. If the buboes could be popped and
their poisonous contents extracted from the body, the victim stood a
good chance of recuperating. If they did not reach a head, and the poison
remained, the victim usually died.
Doctors believed that causing the patient to sweat would make the buboes
form a head; patients were covered with hot blankets and seated next
to raging fires. If the buboes remained unpoppable, doctors placed over
them hot glass suction cups usually used for bleeding, or daubed them
with roasted white onion. And if that didn’t work, a skilled physician
could try to cut them out, though the bone-shattering pain of such an operation
without anesthesia and the resulting infection often carried off an
already weakened patient.
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