I barely have strength left to apply quill to parchment. The muscles in my arms throb. The stench of pus is embedded in my nostrils. I lanced buboes and applied fresh salves long after sundown.

The tempers run short in our once-great city. Earlier, the townspeople jostled violently for position in the queue to consult with me. More than once, the shouting led to fisticuffs. I had to banish one man, the local tanner, after he barged into my room demanding immediate attention even as my fingers were buried deep in the armpit of another.

People are not the only victims of this sickness. So, too, are common values such as decency, compassion, and even order. The spectacles I have witnessed in recent days would embarrass even the most seasoned of men. This pestilence has driven people to the extremes of deportment. I have seen panic on the faces of hardened soldiers and stoic acceptance in the eyes of young naïfs. Some say it has turned men either toward heaven or hell.

Many cling with blind zeal to prayers and rituals. They spend most of their time at church, and to demonstrate their sacrifice to God, some even shun the most basic comforts, including food or drink in the daylight hours and a bed after nightfall.

Others feel abandoned by God, and therefore freed of the obligation to live by His laws. They carry themselves with wanton disregard and, at times, shameless gall. They gamble on the street, drink themselves to stupor in the daylight, carouse openly with those who are not their wives or husbands. I have heard that several among them support their hedonism by looting the property of the newly dead or, even worse, that of those too infirm to resist.

Who am I to judge? We each carry our burden in our own way. Still, I must confess to being saddened to have learned that my former protégé has joined the ranks of the hedonists.

Lorenzo Mirandolo apprenticed under me for two years. The boy showed true promise. I once observed him reset a shattered ankle on a peddler whose weighty cart had rolled over his foot. Lorenzo aligned the deformed foot and ankle with such precision that, within three months, the peddler was walking again with only the slightest of limps.

Sadly, Lorenzo’s family served as the earliest of kindling for this newly lit bonfire of death. His mother died before the New Year arrived, and his father, two sisters, and youngest brother all succumbed in the following week. Lorenzo went nearly mad with sorrow.

One morning, early in January, he did not arrive at the appointed hour to help clean the surgical utensils. Punctuality was among his most consistent virtues, so I was concerned that he, too, must have fallen ill. When I told Camilla that I was going to seek him, she warned me to curtail my expectations. Her intuition proved correct. Camilla was prescient that way. I shall never forget the tears of sorrow she cried, two summers before, upon telling me that she was with child. She foresaw then that she would never carry the baby to life.