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In Germany there was a repetition in every respect of the same phenomena. The infallible signs of the oriental bubo-plague with its inevitable contagion were found there as everywhere else; but the mortality was not nearly so great as in the other parts of Europe.13 The accounts do not all make mention of the spitting of blood, the diagnostic symptom of this fatal pestilence; we are not, however, thence to conclude that there was any considerable mitigation or modification of the disease, for we must not only take into account the defectiveness of the chronicles, but that isolated testimonies are often contradicted by many others. Thus, the chronicles of Strasburg, which only take notice of boils and glandular swellings in the axillæ and groins,14 are opposed by another account, according to which the mortal spitting of blood was met with in Germany;15 but this again is rendered suspicious, as the narrator postpones the death of those who were thus affected, to the sixth, and (even the) eighth day, whereas, no other author sanctions so long a course of the disease; and even in Strasburg, where a mitigation of the plague may, with most probability, be assumed, since in the year 1349, only 16,000 people were carried off, the generality expired by the third or fourth day.16 In Austria, and especially in Vienna, the plague was fully as malignant as any where, so that the patients who had red spots and black boils, as well as those afflicted with tumid glands, died about the third day;17 and lastly, very frequent sudden deaths occurred on the coasts of the North Sea and in Westphalia, without any further development of the malady.18

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