An infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, transmitted mainly by fleas. The Black Death devastated Europe from 1346 to 1353, and the disease was present somewhere on the continent in every year until 1671. Fearing contagion, the sick were isolated: Venice set a forty-day waiting period in 1448, the origin of quarantine; in London in 1665, the house of anyone who died of plague was shut up for forty days.
Where It Appears
Quotes
A plague o' both your houses!