Eyewitness to Black Plague: In the opening section, the Florentine writer Boccaccio (1313-1375) recounted his observations of the plague. According to Boccaccio, most people died within about three days of the appearance of tumors. Due to the quantity of dead bodies, churches abandoned the ancient custom of burying the dead in individual graves grouped by family. Reading Boccaccio stimulates us to consider how a pandemic of a new incurable disease or a continent-wide natural disaster, with a similar death rate as the 14th-century plague, would affect the practice of science in our society and universities today. Publication of Galileo’s literary masterpiece, the Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World (1632), was held up by an outbreak of plague.