Introduction by Mary Hulton

"Plague Fears Haunt City" - thus read a local headline for September 30th 1994. The city in question was Birmingham and the fears arose from eight passengers who had landed in England, feeling unwell, after flying from India where Plague had broken out a few days before. Later it appeared that the people concerned had, in fact, been struck down by flu; but an international panic continued to be reponed by the press for another week and Surat, the city where the outbreak was centred, was said to have been abandoned by at least 500,000 of its inhabitants, starting with the more affluent middle classes; those naturally least at risk. Nonetheless, in this period, further small scale outbreaks occurred elsewhere in India, including its capital, Delhi, before antibiotic treatment and public hygiene measures appear to have brought the whole episode under control in about ten days.

The speed of treatment and control mark out this twentieth century event from previous manifestations of the dread disease – through many millennia.  However, as in the past, the organism responsible for the various forms of 'plague' or 'Black Death' (Yersinia pestis) is likely to continue to mutate and so bring disaster to poverty ridden areas and, in its wake, to promote panic far and wide.

Writing in 1996, P.J.P.Goldberg used a different modern parallel, that of AIDS, to emphasise the concept of helplessness felt by earlier generations faced with an undefined and untreatable threat of infection. No single late-Twentieth century parallel will go more than a short distance to kindle our imagination, but such parallels do begin to give us a way to enter into the lives of Coventry people six and a half centuries ago.

This pamphlet (No. 23 in our series) deals, of course, with much more than the progress of this dreaded epidemic, for its subject is, rightly, a general consideration of the life of the city at this early phase.