¹⁰³ Guy’s account of his own experience (Inventarium, 117.35 – 119.35) is one of our most important medical descriptions of the pandemic from the period. He differentiated between the disease that swept Europe in 1348 (of which he had already distinguished a rapid, pulmonary form from a slightly slower one that produced swellings in the armpits and groin) and a slightly differently manifesting condition in 1360. In case of the latter, he noted that instead of afflicting the populace in general, it targeted ‘many rich and noble people and innumerable children, and few women’. Had there been any obvious difference in the manifestation of the earlier pandemic by sex, we can assume that he or some other commentator would have mentioned it. Modern controversy over how the great pandemic of the Black Death should be classified in biomedical terms continues. I find persuasive the evidence of modern DNA techniques to confirm the presence of the plague bacillus, Yersiniapestis, in 14th-century remains. See most recently Michel Drancourt, etal., ‘Yersiniapestis Orientalis in Remains of Ancient Plague Patients’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Feb. 2007, <http://www.cdc.gov/EID/content/13/12/332.htm> accessed 10 February 2007.