Black Death ATOS 12.22

Black Death

Source: Wikipedia

The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people and peaking in Europe in the years 1346–53. Although there were several competing theories as to the etiology of the Black Death, analysis of DNA from victims in northern and southern Europe published in 2010 and 2011 indicates that the pathogen responsible was the Yersinia pestis bacterium, probably causing several forms of plague.

The Black Death is thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, where it then travelled along the Silk Road, reaching the Crimea by 1343. The plague disease, caused by Yersinia pestis, is commonly present in populations of fleas carried by ground rodents, including marmots, in various areas including much of Asia and Africa. Graves in Kyrgizstan have inscriptions referring to plague and are thought by many epidemiologists to mark the outbreak of the epidemic, from which it could easily have spread to China and India.

From there, it was most likely carried by Oriental rat fleas living on the black rats that were regular passengers on merchant ships. Spreading throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, the Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60% of Europe's total population. All in all, the plague reduced the world population from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century.

The aftermath of the plague created a series of religious, social, and economic upheavals, which had profound effects on the course of European history. It took 150 years for Europe's population to recover. The 14th-century eruption of the Black Death had a drastic effect on Europe's population, irrevocably changing the social structure, and resulted in widespread persecution of minorities such as Jews, foreigners, beggars, and lepers. The uncertainty of daily survival has been seen as creating a general mood of morbidity, influencing people to "live for the moment," as illustrated by Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron (1353). The importance of hygiene was recognized only in the nineteenth century; until then it was common that the streets were filthy, with live animals of all sorts around and human parasites abounding. A transmissible disease will spread easily in such conditions. One development as a result of the Black Death was the establishment of the idea of quarantine in Dubrovnik in 1377 after continuing outbreaks.

Medieval people called the catastrophe of the 14th century either the "Great Pestilence"' or the "Great Plague". Writers during the time of the plague referred to the event as the "Great Mortality." Swedish and Danish chronicles of the 17th century described the events as "black" for the first time, not to describe the late-stage sign of the disease, in which the sufferer's skin would blacken due to subepidermal hemorrhages (broken blood vesils under the skin) and the extremities would darken with a form of gangrene, but more likely to refer to black in the sense of glum or dreadful and to denote the terror and gloom of the events. Gasquet (1908) claimed that the Latin name "atra mors" (Black Death) for an epidemic first appeared in modern times in 1631 in a book on Danish history by J.I. Pontanus, where Pontanus wrote about a disease that occurred in 1348. However, Gasquet doubted that Pontanus was referring to bubonic plague. Nevertheless, the name spread through Scandinavia and then Germany. In England, it was not until 1823 that the medieval epidemic was first called the Black Death.

Contemporary accounts of symptoms of the plague are often varied or imprecise. The most commonly noted symptom was the appearance of buboes in the groin, the neck and armpits, which oozed pus and bled when opened. These buboes spread across the body in varying sizes, turning black or bright red in color. This was followed by acute fever and vomiting of blood. Most victims died two to seven days after initial infection. David Herlihy identifies another potential sign of the plague: freckle-like spots and rashes which could be caused by flea-bites. Some accounts, like that of Louis Heyligen, a musician in Avignon who died of the plague in 1348, noted a distinct form of the disease which infected the lungs and led to respiratory problems and which is identified with pneumonic plague.

More recently other forms of plague have been implicated with symptoms including fever of 100–106 °F, headaches, painful aching joints, nausea and vomiting, and a general feeling of malaise. Left untreated, of those that contract the bubonic plague, 80 percent die within eight days. Pneumonic plague has a mortality rate of 90 to 95 percent. Symptoms include fever, cough, and blood-tinged sputum. As the disease progresses, sputum becomes free flowing and bright red. Septicemic plague is the least common of the three forms, with a mortality rate near 100%. Symptoms are high fevers and purple skin patches. In cases of pneumonic and particularly septicemic plague the progress of the disease is so rapid that there would often be no time for the development of the enlarged lymph nodes that were noted as buboes.

There have been numerous outbreaks of plague recurring occasionally in Europe until the 19th century. There is some controversy over the identity of the disease, but in its virulent form, after the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720–22, the Great Plague of 1738 (which hit Eastern Europe), and the Russian plague of 1770-1772, it seems to have gradually disappeared from Europe. By the early 19th century, (the 1800's,) the threat of plague had diminished, but it was quickly replaced by a new disease: the Asiatic cholera was the first of several cholera pandemics to sweep through Asia and Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries.