Fleeing Plague

Bubonic Plague was an ongoing epidemic that sickened and killed many in Europe and beyond beginning in the mid-fourteenth century and continuing in the days of Martin Luther's sixteenth-century Germany. The pneumonic form of the disease was particularly dangerous because it entered the lungs and was spread by coughing. When this happened the fatality rate was nearly 100%. Martin Luther's treatise on whether one may flee when plague strikes was prompted by a request from the clergy of Breslau, wh