AEGiS-NYT: "COMPARING AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) to the Black Death, as some national magazines are doing, is a highly reckless maneuver that can only feed hysteria and divert us from a serious study of that illness."

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1983. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

"COMPARING AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) to the Black Death, as some national magazines are doing, is a highly reckless maneuver that can only feed hysteria and divert us from a serious study of that illness."

The New York Times - October 2, 1983
Shirley Horner

So says Robert S. Gottfried, the author of "The Black Death" (The Free Press, New York, $16.95),

"The Black Death," writes Dr. Gottfried, a resident of Highland Park and a professor of history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, "devastated the Western world from 1347 to 1351, killing 25 percent to 50 percent of Europe's population."

"It was the plague of plagues," he says, "and there will never be anything like it again, whereas AIDS - the figures show 2,094 reported cases and 806 deaths - has affected less than a tenth of 1 percent of the population."

If Dr. Gottfried's account of the causes, progress and effects of the Black Death strikes us as intensely authentic, it is because he has successfully expanded his sources to include population tallies, medical textbooks, archeological data of lost villages and weather records to help reconstruct the environment of the period.

This thoroughly documented picture of a civilization in crisis makes unforgetable reading. But one should bear in mind the author's introductory comment that "epidemic will strike at least once in every generation and act as a regular population check."

"New Jersey's Money," by George W. Wait and edited by Dorothy Budd Bartle, a volume that has received lavish praise from the numismatic community, is now available at a reduced price (Newark Museum, P.O. Box 540, Newark, 07101; $14, plus $2 for mailing costs).

Mr. Wait, who lives in Glen Ridge, is a leading authority on paper money; Mrs. Bartle, from Caldwell, is the curator of the coin collection at the museum, which is at 49 Washington Street.

Turning through the 434 pages of this richly illustrated volume, we can appreciate anew the multifarious history of our state, learning, for example, about wampum, "our first money," and that "possibly the last official use" of those "cylinder- shaped tubular beads of shell" was in 1693, when a fixed sum "paid a one- way fare on the Communipaw (Jersey City) ferry to Brooklyn."

"New Jersey's Money" further reveals that four generations of a family named Campbell (1770-1899) manufactured wampum in Pascack (now Park Ridge) in Bergen County for use "during the Revolution and in trade goods that went West with Lewis and Clark . . . Hard clam shells for the operation came from Rockaway and the Fulton Fish Market, New York."

Before the passage of the National Banking Act in 1863, one of the prime functions of New Jersey banks, beginning in 1804, was to issue their own money. An extensive collection of those obsolete bank notes - with their distinctive vignettes - is reprinted here.

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