“The plague makes us cruel, as dogs, one to another.”

During the plague, Jews were massacred across Europe, falsely accused of poisoning wells. A thousand years before that, in an outbreak of disease in 4th-century BC Athens, people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane,” wrote the historian Thucydides, quoted by Charles Mann in his book 1491. Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century English diarist, wrote of a London epidemic in 1665, “The plague makes us cruel, as dogs, one to another.”

Quelle: How the Black Death Radically Changed the Course of History