Yersinia pestis

Marché place de la Mairie à Aix (J.G. Gagliardini)

Marseille (week 31)

A quick trip into town on a Wednesday afternoon to visit the Musée Regards de Provence, which is a local art museum.  By "local", we mean that the paintings were of local subjects, including fishermen and the port of Marseille, the various calanques around the area, three of Mont Ste.-Victoire, etc.

autoclave+film projected on water

The building is also a sort of memorial because it is housed in the last of the quarantine stations of the Port of Marseille.  Built just after WWII, it had a conveyor-belt efficiency, with clothes going into autoclaves while passengers took disinfecting showers and had their medical exams.  However, it only processed a few thousand visitors because it became redundant when the World Health Organization instituted a system of health certificates and vaccines became common (no vaccine record, no health certificate, no entry).  There is a fairly chilling film experience (it includes props, several screens, and running water) dedicated to the last pandemic-level outbreak of plague in western Europe in 1720.  The West had done well for the previous 140 years because after the outbreak of 1580, a quarantine system at the major European ports was created, which worked very well.  But in 1720, the Grand-Saint-Antoine arrived from the Levant with a cargo of silk and cotton and the city merchants pressured the Quarantine Board to lift the ship's quarantine, even though the captain reported 3 "suspicious deaths" en route.  As a result, 100,000 died in Provence, including roughly half of the population of Marseille.