The Black Death
Postscript
Last outbreak in England was the Great Plague of London in 1665. This was the sort of epidemic that was characteristic of the plague after the 15th century: restricted to a city or a region.
The sensible thing to do when the plague struck was to get out of town, for people expected the plague would remain local. Aristocrats could do this because they had estates in the countryside. The poor, of course, had nowhere to go, so they remained and died. One of those in 1665 who had a country estate was a young Cambridge professor, Isaac Newton. He had been working on some theories and mathematical problems regarding the physics of motion, but his teaching duties allowed him little time to work on them.
The plague of 1665 forced him into isolation and idleness. It was while at his country estate in the summer of 1665 that Newton solved the mathematical problems associated with his theory of gravitation.
The bubonic plague did not go away. It still exists, everywhere in the world. It is quite common among rodent populations--rats, of course, but squirrels, rabbits and skunks as well. The Rocky Mountains (where I live) is one of the places where it is still widespread. Every few years I read in the newspapers how a hunter has contracted the disease. We have a cure for it, but the disease moves very quickly, and there are some isolated places in the Rockies, and once in a while the hunter doesn't make it.
The plague is still very much with us.


