Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.The grim reality is that plague in the capital is as common as the stench of the cesspits and almost as unavoidable. You cannot predict where it will strike: People living next door to infected houses are left unaffected. Some people are not touched even when others in their own house have it.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.But what if it comes to the worst? What if you have painful black buboes in your groin and armpits, and experience the rapid pulse, the headaches, the terrific thirst, and delirium that are the tokens of the plague? There is little you can do. Physicians will prescribe the traditional medicines of dragon water, mithridatium, and theriac if they hear you are suffering but you will suspect that these are cynical attempts to relieve a dying person of his money. The physicians themselves will not normally come near you. Simon Forman, who does attend plague sufferers, is a rare exception: this is because he has himself survived the disease and believes he cannot catch it again.
Read the passage.If you ever visit Denver, Colorado, you should allow yourself several hours to peruse the Denver Art Museum’s Asian art collection. This world-renowned collection houses an impressive array of artwork, including woodblock prints, tea ceremony articles, bamboo sculptures, and much more. One piece of particular interest is a 17th-century ink-on-silk drawing of Daruma, a South Indian monk. Visitors can also view Japanese ceramics and paintings by women artists from the 17th–19th centuries—the largest such collection outside of Japan. The Denver Art Museum is one of the larger US art museums, with its global collections containing more than 70,000 works of art from around the world.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.There is no concept of "health and safety” in Elizabethan England, so you will inevitably feel vulnerable when you arrive. Nauseating smells and sights will assail your senses; contemporary standards of cleanliness will worry you. People die every day from unknown ailments, the young as often as the old. Infectious diseases periodically kill thousands within a few weeks. Even when plague is not in town, it lurks as an anxiety in the back of people’s minds and, when it does strike, their worry turns to terror. On top of the illnesses, the chances of being attacked and hurt are much higher than in the modern world, and workplace injuries are far more common.
Which line best helps develop the central idea that the plague was almost impossible for Elizabethans to survive?
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