The "languid" had turned out to be those mentally ill who just sat there. Who'dathunkit?
Getting DDT into all of Kronach's houses, rich and poor alike, hadn't been too much of a challenge, once the authorities swung into action. With the doctors from Padua there to direct things, the council had set up a Magistracy of Public Health on the Venetian model. Which didn't exactly involve separation of powers. The Health Board could legislate action to be taken, it could order the action carried out, and it was the judicial authority that heard noncompliance cases. Given the level of down-time medical knowledge, it was no surprise that, according to Dr. Guarinoni, the motto of plague doctors was, "prevention is much more noble and more necessary than therapy."
It wasn't hard to get enough DDT. Matt had brought some with him when he came back from Grantville. They'd found an ample supplementary supply at the drop point within two weeks of asking for it.
Yeah. While they were stuck in Kronach, the three doctors had absorbed the up-time medical knowledge about transmission vectors, so they'd directed a lot of their efforts toward persuading de Melon and the city council that the rats had to be eradicated. It hadn't been all that hard for Matewski to persuade them that the transmission vector was little bugs in the blood rather than nasty, sticky, bad-smelling, poisonous, atoms that emanated from infected sources such as stinking garbage in alleys and stuck to inanimate objects, animals, and people when the air was corrupted, or miasmic, rather than salubrious.
After all, a person couldn't see either one. Matewski had promised them that after this was over, he'd somehow get hold of an up-time microscope from Grantville and let them take a look at plague bacilli. They were looking forward to this, particularly since he told them that up-time science had confirmed the existence of atoms, even if they were too small to see through a microscope.
The doctors were particularly happy to hear that plague bacilli were made up of atoms, ultimately. Probably nasty, poisonous, ones. So maybe that wasn't the way Nichols or Adams or Shipley would have explained it to them, but Matewski had never claimed to be a doctor.
They were also happy to hear that almost the first enterprise of every Italian health board when the plague struck—namely, cleaning up the smelly garbage—had been a good idea, even if the underlying theory was inaccurate. So was the custom of having the men from lay sodalities visit all the poor houses in the town, clean them thoroughly, and give them a fresh coat of whitewash, inside and out.
At any rate, if Grantville had any luck at all, it was luck that it had made an ally of Venice. And not enemies, really, of Florence and Genoa. Those cities had developed plague-fighting as far as it could go with the knowledge and techniques that the seventeenth century had available. They'd had the organization, already. What they knew about medicine hadn't matched up to it, but . . . In Kronach, now, they were combining what Grantville knew about medicine with what plenty of Italians already knew about handling the, uh, bureaucracy of the thing. If it worked here, the new USE would put it into force in all the towns and cities.
What the USE really needed was some sort of . . . pipeline . . . for hiring more Italians. It really did.
Yeah, they'd gotten exemplary military and civilian cooperation on the rat eradication project.
Even if that meant that the fleas went looking for other hosts—human hosts—faster than would ordinarily have been the case. At least they hadn't done the old-fashioned thing of killing off the dogs and cats. Dogs and cats not only caught rats, but gave the fleas a few more options. And Kronach wasn't starving. He'd seen to that himself. So the Kronacher weren't eating the cats and dogs. Much less plague-infected rats.
The city had food. He was making the council pay for it, but it came in regular deliveries. He also made sure that the city council let the people know that the food was arriving because of his benevolent magnanimity. Or Vince's. Or Steve Salatto's. Or Grantville's. Or by sufferance of Mike Stearns and Gustavus Adolphus.
Think nice thoughts about us, folks. After all, one of my jobs is to incorporate this town into a happy, democratic, tolerant, Franconia when the time comes. Sure. That's gonna work. Kronach and Coburg. The ranchers and the farmers should be friends. Yippee.
He looked down at himself. In a world without latex, you did what you could, even if that meant that you swathed and robed yourself in waxed linen, with a breath mask over your face. The down-time theory was that it was harder for the nasty atoms to stick to waxed cloth. According to Gatterer, a slippery silk ought to work, too, but it cost too much. Guarinoni had admitted that he had never previously had much faith in the usefulness of the waxed linen robes, thinking that they were a Frenchified affectation and that all they really did was keep most of the fleas that tended to infest pest houses off the physicians. Then he'd thought again about transmission vectors and added, "Well . . . Maybe there is some point to them, after all."