It now also destroyed a great many children, whom it had formerly spared, and but few women.
The like was seen in Egypt.

Here also inflammation of the lungs was predominant, and destroyed quickly and infallibly, with burning heat and expectoration of blood.

Here too the breath of the sick spread a deadly contagion, and human aid was as vain as it was destructive to those who approached the infected.
Boccacio, who was an eye-witness of its incredible fatality in Florence, the seat of the revival of science, gives a more lively description of the attack of the disease than his non-medical contemporaries.
It commenced here, not as in the East, with bleeding at the nose, a sure sign of inevitable death; but there took place at the beginning, both in men and women, tumours in the groin and in the axilla, varying in circumference up to the size of an apple or an egg, and called by the people, pest-boils (gavoccioli).

Then there appeared similar tumours indiscriminately over all parts of the body, and black or blue spots came out on the arms or thighs, or on other parts, either single and large, or small and thickly studded.

These spots proved equally fatal with the pest-boils, which had been from the first regarded as a sure sign of death.