The Plague at Marseilles Consider'd: With Remarks Upon the Plague in General, Shewing Its Cause and Nature of Infection, with Necessary Precautions to Prevent the Speading of That Direful Distemper

In 1720, a ship arrived in Marseille carrying more than cotton from the Levant. Within months, the city was engulfed in plague, and over 50,000 would perish. Richard Bradley, writing in the immediate aftermath, gives us something rare: a front-row seat to the last great plague epidemic of Western Europe, rendered with the urgent curiosity of a man trying to understand catastrophe as it unfolds. Bradley's treatise blends meticulous observation with emerging theories about contagion. He interviews physicians who walked among the dying, records the symptoms with clinical precision, and wrestles with questions that would not be settled for centuries: What causes plague? How does it spread? Why do some survive and others die? His answers, framed by the miasma theory of the age, still carry the electricity of genuine inquiry. He advocates quarantine, isolation, and sanitary cordons with the conviction of a man who has seen a city collapse. This is not merely historical curiosity. It is a window into the birth of modern epidemiology, when thinkers were beginning to suspect what they could not yet prove about the invisible transfer of disease.