The story of Mary King’s Close is closely related to the terrible plague that swept through Edinburgh in 1645, being the hardest hit area of the city. Believed to be the Bubonic plague, the pandemic killed more than half the city’s population. Victims displayed flu-like symptoms, followed by buboes, or pus-filled lymph nodes, which ruptured and killed the patient through septicaemia and mucus-filled boils. Death was slow and painful, though not inevitable. Those who contracted the pneumonic form of the plague died quickly as the disease attacked the lungs and turned the body “black” from haemorrhaging, hence the term the “black death”. Doctors wore herb-filled, beak-like masks to protect themselves from airborne infection and leather cloaks to protect themselves from flea bites, but many died all the same, as did Edinburgh’s...
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