We still do not know what causes the pestilence, although it is conspicuous that during the time of pestilence there were always many rats, which themselves died of the pest and then disgustingly lay around. So we are limited in our battle to turning to God and praying that He may spare us and our neighbors—although more us. To this end, pest altars were erected with the pictures of Holy Helpers, as was ordered by our gracious elector, who commissioned Anton Burgkmair from Augsburg with this. Our father, however, said that trusting solidly in God and not in the saints is more wholesome to our health. Also, what was left was the gentle care of the sick and their confinement in their houses, on which were painted pest crosses. Too, as long as the disease helpers had not left the town, the use of the pest needle for piercing the boils, also called bubos, was common. I have later seen, though, during visits to the sick and supervision of barber-surgeons and barbers, that the piercing of a bubo and also the bloodletting hastened the sickness. The purulent content of the bubos would often be emptied onto the dungheap or into the river, and today I think that this helped to spread the disease.
All the people paid close attention to any sign of swelling in the groin or the armpit, of fever or headache. My brother Johannes was, as has been told, spared; not, however, our Black Monastery. Here fell ill the student Jost Honold from Augsburg, a beautiful youth, who had lived with us for three months and wished urgently to live and to study further.
Although our mother was pregnant, she and Aunt Lene bound cloths over their faces, as it is believed that through the breath of the sick one can be infected, and tended to him. They wrapped him in warm blankets and placed warm bricks in his bed to allow him to sweat. As boils in his armpits and groin appeared, they were not fearful of his nakedness, remarking, however, how small, in comparison to the boils, the testicles were, about which they indulgently smiled and washed him with a brew made of vervain and rue. And finally Aunt Lene prepared for him Chelidonium majus, or greater celandine, to induce sweating. She cleaned the root of the plant and cut it up small. Of which she put a handful in a half measure of rose vinegar, boiled it down to half, and strained it. In this broth she rubbed three cloves of garlic, as the Alexandrian theriac is too expensive and also not to be found in our town. She gave the sick young man a small glass of the brew, which caused him to sweat for three hours.
Then my mother dried him with warm towels, although one feared for her and her unborn child. Jost had great fear of death, yet lo! the boils disappeared and he recovered. The renowned Dr. Schurff did not want to believe it, but all the people convinced him that the young man could once again look out of his clear brown eyes. Because of this apparent cure, Mother even had to go to the elector’s castle, where, however, she could not help the beautiful young maiden, the love-child of the deceased elector Frederick.
In the Black Monastery the maid Lisbeth, two students, and the clerk fell ill and died. Father assisted in the nursing by washing and feeding the sick.
The dead in the city were no longer buried in the cemetery but rather fetched in pest carts and buried in large pits next to the cemetery. In order to purify the pestilential air, fires were ignited in the streets and squares, especially with the wood of juniper, and prayers were said and Jews were hunted.
Finally God relented, the rats disappeared, the dead were buried, and people started to celebrate as usual.
I think today that pestilence is not caused by miasmas of the earth, which are poisonous vapors of the soil, as Hippocrates teaches; rather, I stand with the Italian doctor Girolamo Fracastoro, who attributed the infection to seminaria morbi, that is, sickness-carrying germs.
Therefore I also do not hold with the corresponding belief that the burning of fragrant wood is an efficient remedy. Rather, one should kill the rats and keep people away from each other. So was it not beneficial that in many towns the number of church services with entreaties for intercession increased and processions with large numbers of people were organized. It is understandable enough that some magistrates prohibited such gatherings for the duration of the pest, as it turned out that such gatherings contributed to the spread of the disease.
The praiseworthy Council of Nuremberg forbade the procession of the flagellants and had the city gates closely monitored so that no one ill with the pest was allowed to be brought into the city. Also, dead were not allowed in.
My father dealt with the question of fear and the flight from death with the tract “If One May Flee from Death.” At first, the preachers and pastors as good shepherds have to stand by their flocks during pest times, as it says in John, chapter 10, verse 12: “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming and leaveth the sheep and fleeth; and the wolf catcheth them and scattereth the sheep.”
Other people, he says, who through service or duty are bound to each other should stay: a servant, for example, should not flee from his master or a maid from her mistress, unless it is with the knowledge and agreement of the master or mistress; vice versa, the master should not leave the servant or the mistress the maid unless they are provided for sufficiently elsewhere. Because in all these circumstances it is God’s command that the servant and maid should remain bound and obedient. Conversely, master and mistress should provide for their servants. And through God’s command to help and to serve, it is true as well for the father and the mother in regard to their children, and conversely for the children in regard to the father and mother to whom they are bound, etc. Likewise, those who are public persons through pay and wages, such as town physicians, town servants, mercenaries, and the like, are bound to the town. They may not flee unless they find other capable representatives to take their places. Experience also proves that those who serve the sick with love, devotion, and earnestness are generally protected from the disease.
This is an observation of Father’s that I as a doctor can confirm: few of those who undertook the care or the treatment of pest victims, and were supplied with mouth coverings and watched out for the rats, were infected with the pest. Also, town doctors and pest doctors who bravely persevered and wore beak masks were usually spared, especially when the beak masks were filled with certain flavorsome spices, preferably cloves, although those are very expensive. Fragrance was believed to expel disease-carrying stench. My opinion is that it is not the fragrant filling of the beak masks that protects against the disease but rather the distance from the patient that the beak provides.
The God-appointed authorities, whom everyone is required to obey and who also have special responsibility for public health, must if necessary remain in the city.
Father also warned that one should not take on the care of the sick in order to get hold of their heritage or legacy should they die. That would only, he believed, lead to a quick infection and one’s own death. Probably there were cases brought to his knowledge where the caretaker for vile profit accelerated the end of the patient by pressing a pillow on their face, then did not report their death for several days so they could take the provisions that the relations had left on the doorstep and with most of the remaining money or valuable things and devices could leave the house secretly before calling the pest cart.
God evidently holds in His goodness that we small and blind men cannot understand that the pestilence was not sufficient to strengthen our trust in Him and test the steadfastness of our belief and therefore sent the English sweat, or sudor anglicus, so called because it first occurred in England.
This testing, which, like the plague, was followed mostly by death, also included newborn children, who in my present-day opinion had not yet been given the chance by our loving God to commit any sins at all but were still buried in the state of peccatum originale in their graves or in the pest pits.
First occurred fetid sweat, which soon passed to fever. Then quickly, after one or two days, death. In addition, the patient suffered from anxiety, palpitations, headache, and numbness before God calle
d him to Himself.
God probably also wanted that Father and Huldrych Zwingli in Marburg should not agree on the meaning of Holy Communion. There they had been called by Landgrave Philipp of Hesse, AD 1529, that they might agree on the issue whether our Lord Jesus Christ at Holy Communion is physically present or not. Father insisted that he was, while for Zwingli, the sacrament was merely to be regarded as an act of Christian confession. But before they came to blows, they had to terminate their discussion because of an outbreak of the disease. So the question whether the copula est in the biblical sentence Hoc est corpus meum is synonymous with is or with means could not be answered.
Today I ask myself why God and our Lord Jesus Christ allowed the semantic ambiguity of the Latin copula est, even though Christ had actually spoken Aramaic, to hold so much importance for us that it would impede the great work of the Reformation of the old church. But God’s ways are inscrutable. Father wrote to Mother (do not be surprised, reader, that Father sometimes addressed Mother with the word Herr; this he did to emphasize her dominating role in the household and also to tease her a little bit):
My kind, dear Herr Katharina Luther, Doctoress, Preacheress at Wittenberg. Dear Käthe, we are in every respect united except that the counterparty holds fast to the belief that in the Lord’s Supper we eat plain bread and that Christ is only present in spirit. I mean, God has so blinded them that they have nothing valid to raise.
Kiss little Lenchen and Hans for me.
Your willing servant, Martin Luther.
In the end, thank God, the debaters agreed on retaining the chalice for the laity, whereby certainly a great service was done to please God and obtain eternal salvation.
Against the English sweat, the town physician knew of no remedy, and the people died more quickly and more painfully than of the pest. Few survived the sickness, and those who did continued to suffer from palpitations and night sweats. Also, one could suffer a relapse, which had not been observed with the pest.
Reader, I can tell you quite something about the English sweat—how it, for example, raged in England. It had been reported to me by a young man from England with whom I could reasonably converse in Latin. His name was William Shakspeare, and the reasons for his stay in our good town of Wittenberg after a difficult trip over water and land were soon made clear to me.
I encountered him a few years ago, I believe it was AD 1589 at the university, where I took part in a disputation of a doctorate. By chance, we sat next to each other in the auditorium and together left the hall. I invited him to several tankards of wine in the Ratskeller, because I very much wanted to hear of England, which was the first country in the world that had in its entirety broken from the papist church. William quickly came to trust me when he heard that I was the son of the honored Martin Luther.
And now a surprising disclosure. First, he was very well informed about the appearance of the English sweat in his homeland, and second, he told me frankly of his future plans to become a disciple of Thalia, the muse of comedy and idyllic poetry. As if he already wanted to prepare for play-writing, which he strove for besides play-acting, he observed everything around him with sharp eyes and was thankful for any knowledge I could give him about men, their motives, their communications, matters of the heart, if known, and political issues as well as the teaching of my father. He sucked up the world around him like a sponge sucks up water, and I should not wonder if this young man one day achieves fame. Naturally, his Latin was in need of improvement, but it was sufficient for us to communicate about many things.
It seems to me that his stay in Wittenberg was not entirely voluntary, for he hinted that because of poaching from a local noble named Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote near his birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon, he was pursued, had flown to the Netherlands, where he became a soldier, of which existence he became weary, so he deserted, coming to Saxony. When the situation in England had calmed down, he would, he said, return home forthwith. I know not what in Wittenberg he lived on, but I believe he had brought a certain amount of money from the Netherlands, which he supplemented by teaching English to several students at the university.
For professional and medical reasons, what interested me mainly was what he knew about sudor anglicus, whereby his soaring theater plans were somewhat pushed into the background. The following truths, he related, are generally accepted in England:
The English sweat first occurred in the army of King Henry VII and in some small towns wasted away almost all the residents. In the time of Henry VIII, then still a good Catholic whom the pope had honored with the title Defensor Fidei, “Defender of the Faith,” the disease occurred again, this time in London, and many fell victim to it. That was AD 1528. The king departed London and fled from the sickness to the countryside. The aforementioned title the king had received, incidentally, for the book, authored together with Thomas Morus, who was not mentioned as coauthor, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, or “The Defense of the Seven Sacraments,” was at the same time a defense of the pope against my father’s concepts.
Herr Shakspeare even knew that in the autumn of the same year, as the Turks for the first time lay siege to Vienna, they were visited by the English sweat, and their siege army was thoroughly decimated.
The English sweat and the pest sometimes intervened in war events, as is shown in the campaign of Charles V against the city of Rome in the year 1527, now known as the Sacco di Roma or the Sack of Rome. As Charles’s troops plundered the city, an epidemic now believed to be the English sweat broke out in the Eternal City. Soon some twenty-five hundred Germans died of the disease. The streets were covered with dead and dying. German Landsknechts, mercenary pikemen, who adhered to my father’s new belief, made a particular point in the city of the Antichrist of humiliating church dignitaries, of committing robbery, and of violating the papal symbols. But God did not allow this to go unpunished, Antichrist or not. Of the twenty-four thousand soldiers who had conquered the city, violated the citizens, tortured, and murdered, only half returned again to the North. The disease had done its work. Unfortunately, Georg von Frundsberg, the wonderful general of the emperor’s—who, at the Diet of Worms when my father had refused to recant, had encouraged and comforted him—was so shocked about the insubordination of his army, which had begun when they were still in camp near Bologna, that he suffered a stroke and had to be carried to his castle in Mindelheim, where he soon was to die. My father, who regretted the outrage of the emperor’s army, commented, “Christ reigns in such a way that the emperor who persecutes Luther for the pope is forced to destroy the pope for Luther.”
I met Herr Shakspeare several times and had every time a most interesting conversation. Then he disappeared as unexpectedly as he had arrived.
With pestilence and English sweat, one might assume there were in the time of my parents and my childhood enough of plagues. But the Lord God had devised something else, for a change as it were, to force his creation to faith and love. Or Satan had made representations to him as he had done with Job, the man in the land of Uz, who was just and good and God-fearing and avoided evil. Perhaps Satan had said to God, “Strike Wittenberg, whom you protected after the pest and the English sweat, and you will see how they depart from the true faith.” And God allowed Satan in the year 1540 to enter into some weathermakers and their followers—about which in my chapter about the witches I will write—and these, people believed, prayed to Satan and brought about a terrible drought.
All the fearful sickness, suffering, war, and death seemed to have culminated in our time, and Master Albrecht Dürer from Nuremberg drew these apocalyptic events. He early attached himself to my father and wrote to Spalatin: “It urges me to come to Dr. Martinus and with diligence to portray him and to engrave him in copper to create a lasting memory of this Christian man, who has helped me out of great fears.”
Master Dürer, whom I respect above all other Christian painters and draftsmen, fell again into great fear when he heard of Father’s abduction, but about the backgr
ound he did not know anything. In his diary from his time in Antwerp, we can read how he heard about the abduction of Luther but not that he was safely brought to Wartburg Castle. So he feared that he might have been murdered and hoped that God would send another man of equal wisdom who would continue Luther’s work.
As it became clear that the Wittenberg Nightingale, as Luther was named by mastersinger and shoemaker Hans Sachs, was still alive and hard at work translating the Bible, he was very glad.
Yes, reader, Master Dürer had carved the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse into wood in AD 1497 or 1498 and had printed many copies so that it could be purchased by anyone and viewed with anxiety and premonition. From the fourth horseman, who with the others cruelly crossed the land, it is stated in the Revelation of John: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”
Death also came many times over Nuremberg, often through pestilence, and in 1494 Dürer fled to Venice, and again in 1506, out of fear of the disease. His first flight to Venice was beneficial for him in the opinion of the scholars because he learned much that enriched his work.
People being by nature obstinate, they often refuse to learn, and since the pest and English sweat were not enough to teach them to recognize God’s love, in 1541 He sent a great drought.
I counted at the time seven springtimes. The winter with snow and cold had come and gone, and the snow thaw had swollen the Elbe, which flooded its banks. But just in time, the fields dried off and could be cultivated so that by the end of March, green shoots were sprouting everywhere; the march cups, snowdrops, tulips, and crocuses bloomed; the bumblebees came out of their nests underground; the cattails appeared in the meadows; and alder, poplar, and hazel began to sprout and nourish Mother’s bees.
Shadows of My Father Page 9