An Account of the Plague Which Raged at Moscow, in 1771

In the sweltering summer of 1771, Moscow descended into nightmare. The plague had arrived, and with it came terror that would claim tens of thousands of lives. Dr. Charles de Mertens, a physician who watched the city unravel, recorded everything: the first mysterious deaths at the military hospital, the physicians who dismissed the warnings, the moment when denial gave way to devastation. This is not a dry historical document but a frontline dispatch from a city in crisis, where quack doctors peddled useless remedies, wealthy families fled while the poor trapped inside walls grew sick, and the very fabric of civic life dissolved into panic and prayer. Written in 1799 but drawing on journals and observations from the outbreak itself, de Mertens offers both a harrowing narrative and a physician's desperate plea: learn from this catastrophe. His account stands as one of the earliest systematic attempts to understand how plague spreads, why communities fail to respond, and what must be done before the next inevitable visit from death. For readers drawn to pandemic narratives, medical history, or the extraordinary resilience of ordinary people facing the unimaginable, this is an essential artifact.