By the late fall of 1630, the Black Plague had descended upon northern Italy. The prentice Magistry of Public Health, centered in Florence, took steps to contain and combat the scourge. In this essay,
"Of protean diseases," wrote Sir Clifford Albutt, Cambridge Regius Professor of Physic in 1907, "influenza is the most protean." Summing up medical experience of the disease over the long nineteenth c
