It’s time for the last disease in our trilogy of maladies: the plague! In part 1 we explore the spread and of course the symptoms of the Great Plague aka the Great Mortality aka the Black Death. Are our schoolday recollections of buboes correct? How many plague pits did London have? And what has Bambi got to do with it? Let’s find out.

Our picture is ‘A physician wearing a seventeenth century plague preventive’ from the Wellcome Collection.