Case Study: The Black Death
Sources:
Source 1: The Black Death
An excerpt from Sarum, by Edward Rutherfurd |
It is a tiny life form, a small collection of cells. Under a powerful microscope, the little bacterium has a shape that resembles nothing so much as a safety pin.
It is asexual: like other bacteria, it replicates itself by splitting in two. The bacteria form colonies, residing in the bloodstreams of small rodents, from which fact medicine has allotted them the name Yersinia pestis, and these live for the most part quietly and in peace. They have done so – and still to today – for who knows how many centuries, in obscure regions in places round the globe from the Crimea, to India, and the United States of America. Normally the Yersinia pestis bacteria are contained by antibodies and do not overwhelm the other cells in the blood of their hosts and this stable condition, which my last indefinitely, is called the chronic condition of the disease. Why is it then that at isolated periods, something extraordinary occurs? Why, after remaining in this peaceable state for perhaps a hundred years, should the little cells suddenly spring into hyperactivity, replicating themselves with an urgency that develops into a kind of seething rage, a rage that turns into an explosion? What is the alteration in the environment, the unexpected catalyst that begins the process? Various explanations are offered by science, but no definite answer is known. Whatever its first cause, once the sudden expansion begins, it is almost unstoppable. Nothing but a barrier of the highest mountains, a polar icecap, or an impassable sea, seems to bring it to a halt. Or almost nothing. Modern science has found preventative treatments which were effectively applied when the disease began to break out in the United States of America in the 1970’s so that only a few lives were lost. But the third pandemic of the plague, which killed some ten million in India at the turn of the century, is still continuing, although contained to this day. In the 1340’s, such an explosion occurred. It began in central Asia. From there it spread outwards – eastwards to China, southwards to India, and southwest along the old trading routes to Asia Minor and Turkey. By December 1347, probably carried by ship, it simultaneously appeared in Constantinople and the borders of Greece, Genoa in North West Italy and Marseilles in southern France. Then it swept, like a madness, through the whole of Western Europe. No one had seen such a thing before. The Black Death is a single form of bacterium which is transmitted mainly in two ways, called the bubonic and the pneumonic plagues. The bubonic plague is usually carried from host to host by fleas. No less than seventy-two possible host animals have been identified, from rabbits, hares and squirrels, dogs and cats to – the best know – rats. The different forms of infected animal population are the grouped into two, so that we speak of two varieties of the disease: the sylvatic from to be found amongst non-domestic rodents like squirrels, less likely to share intimate contact with humans – this is the form found in the United States today – and the murine form, usually transmitted through rats, and therefore likely to reach the human population. With the pneumonic plague, the same bacteria are transmitted from one infected human to another, by tiny droplets in the breath. The Black Death travelled round Europe in a huge clockwise curve, from Italy round the west and ending in Scandinavia and the Baltic. That it struck so particularly virulently and spread so completely may have been due to several causes. The population of Europe in the previous century had greatly increased, to a level it was not to reach again until the eighteenth century. A series of bad harvests may have created famines during the first half of the fourteenth century and lowered the resistance of some of the population. It is also thought that the rat population, especially the black household rat, had increased substantially in the thirteenth century – indeed there may have been few if any rats on the island of Britain before that time. All these circumstances, however, are only suggestions – proof is lacking. Indeed, only one definitive statement about the circumstances favoring the reception of the plague emerges from history. It came from the Medical Faculty of the University of Paris, in the year 1348 In the year of Our Lord 1345, on March 20, there was a conjunction of the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the House of Aquarius. The conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter portends death and disaster. The conjunction of Mars and Jupiter portends pestilence in the air. For Jupiter is warm and humid and draws up evil vapours from earth and water; and Mars is hot and dry, and kindles the evil into an infective fire. We must therefore expect a terrible calamity |
Source 3: The Plague, History Channel Documentary
47:00 Flagellants |
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