MOS: The Black Death

We’re currently wading through both the fourth and sixth most deadly pandemics in history, those being AIDS and COVID respectively (technically we’re in the midst of three epidemics, two pandemics, and three outbreaks). The current list of the twenty deadliest disease outbreaks has multiple appearances by the usual suspects of influenza and smallpox. Topping the list and appearing six times, this illness popped in and out of our history with such invariably deadly results that shorthand for the disease came to be synonymous with death.

Today’s Moment of Science… The Black Death.

No matter how much you load up on zinc, vitamin C, or whatever the fuck echinacea is, bubonic plague historically ended the lives of up to 70% of the people infected. The disease can progress to death in just two days or opt to torture you for two weeks before you meet your demise. The worst flu-like symptoms imaginable are the starter pack with this fucker. Bonus content includes gangrene in the extremities, seizures, and those telltale swollen lymph nodes, or buboes, that could necrotize and turn black. It was considered a better sign for survival if buboes swelled enough to be lanced, allowing the release of bacteria that would otherwise spread through the body.

The yersinia pestis bacteria can also present as pneumonic plague or septicemic plague, lung and blood infections respectively. These are the nastier plague cousins with chances of survival in the “you have to be fucking kidding me” range without treatment.

Plague is such a goddamn plague that, even with treatments available today, the mortality rate is still as high as 15%.

So in 1347, without the advantages of antibiotics, microscopes, or twitter to fight about the virtues of bloodletting versus humor balancing, some particularly unpleasant fleas arrived in Europe.

How the plague hitched a ride to Europe is about as clear as a wrinkled ballsack. The plague’s origin was pinpointed by geneticists to the mountains between Kyrgyzstan and China about 2,600 years ago. As for the Black Death in the 1300s though, some historians are like “idk, maybe the Silk Road, maybe the Caspian Sea?” There’s evidence suggesting that a plague outbreak started in modern day Kyrgyzstan in 1338, but it’s unclear if that was the primary source.

The most colorful account of how it started is that the Golden Horde from Mongolia showed up for battle in Crimea with a touch of plague. Making lemon bombs from diseased lemons, they catapulted dead bodies over the city walls in one of the earliest suspected acts of biological warfare.

However it got there, once it arrived bubonic plague promptly and continually ravaged the continent.

“Cures” in the mid-1300s for plague are only funny because we’re not the ones taking them. There were the Flagellants who thought whipping themselves would lessen God’s wrath of the plague, and I can’t wait for someone to tell Joe Rogan it worked for them. It was fairly common for people to bathe in urine or rub herbs and spices on themselves, making them an interesting smelling dead person. My personal favorite was the Vicary Method which utilized a live chicken with a freshly plucked back. Apply the chicken directly to the swollen lymph nodes, and you know it’s working when the chicken dies.
(Or when the patient dies, whichever comes first.)

Then there was the old standby: blame the Jews, and do all the state sanctioned murder you can get away with in the fourtheenth century. Which was an alarming bit of murder.

None of this stopped the plague, obviously. There wasn’t anything at the time that could bring a disease like this to a sudden halt. Social distancing in the form of these newfangled ‘quarantines,’ the practice of holding sailors in their ships for forty days before letting them ashore, helped keep things to a dull roar for the next few centuries.

Now we’ve got antibiotics. And we understand hygiene, which might actually be more important in this case.

You see, the plague spread too fast for the historically suspected rat fleas to be the main cause. Recent studies have used computer modeling to analyze the possible vectors of rat fleas, human fleas, or airborne transmission.

Turns out, humans were the plague rats all along, spreading disease to each other from fleas that lived in hair and clothes. It’s unclear how much involvement rats had in spreading the disease or if other animal species were involved, but the rats seem to be off the hook.

It was fourteenth century bathing standards that were the problem.

The bubonic plague pandemic of 1347-1353 killed more people and likely a higher percentage of the global population than any other single pandemic in recorded history. The disease is still endemic in several countries, and there are typically a handful of cases diagnosed in the US each year. A 2017 outbreak in Madagascar caused 2417 cases and 209 fatalities.

This has been your Moment of Science, reminding you that we had been unspeakably lucky to live for so long without a pandemic.

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About SciBabe 375 Articles
Yvette d'Entremont, aka SciBabe, is a chemist and writer living in North Hollywood with her roommate, their pack of dogs, and one SciKitten. She bakes a mean gluten free chocolate chip cookie and likes glitter more than is considered healthy for a woman past the age of seven.

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