Plague Entry, 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica

What it is

This is the entry on plague in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 21. The article is credited to Arthur Shadwell, Harriet L. Hennessy and Joseph Frank Payne. The record describes it as a reference article of about 17,832 words. The passage held in the archive is a title page, so the text about the 1346 to 1353 pandemic is not visible in this record. The opening defines plague as a specific infectious fever, and it names earlier pestilences, such as the plague of Athens described by Thucydides.

Why it matters

An encyclopedia entry shows how a disease was classified and explained at a particular time. The 1911 article defines plague as a specific disease, separate from older meanings of the word. Students can compare this view with the medieval accounts of the Black Death, and see how modern medicine changed the way people described an old epidemic.

Look closer

• How does the opening definition change what counts as plague, and why might that matter for the Black Death?
• Which earlier epidemics does the article mention, and which does it leave out?
• Who wrote this reference article, and what might their training have led them to emphasise?