author
Charles de Mertens
1737–1788
An eighteenth-century physician and medical writer, remembered for a vivid firsthand account of the 1771 plague in Moscow. His work blends observation, public health thinking, and the urgency of a city in crisis.
1 Audiobook
An account of the plague which raged at Moscow, in 1771
by Charles de Mertens
About the author
Born in 1737, Charles de Mertens was a Belgian physician whose reputation rests mainly on his writings about epidemic disease. He practiced medicine in an era when plague still haunted Europe, and his name is closely linked with the Moscow outbreak of 1771.
His best-known work is An Account of the Plague Which Raged at Moscow, in 1771, first published in Latin and later translated into other languages. In it, he described the course of the epidemic, the arguments over diagnosis, and the measures used to contain it, making the book valuable both as medical history and as a human record of fear, confusion, and response during a public health emergency.
Other editions and related works connect him with medical observations on fevers and plague, showing a sustained interest in contagious disease. He died in 1788, but his writing continued to circulate afterward, keeping his eyewitness perspective alive for later readers and historians.