The Black Death

“Black Death”, otherwise known as the “Great Mortality”, or simply “The Plague”,Great Mortality  Black Death's sweep through Europe from 1347 to 1351.Europe  Physicians had no idea what to do with the tumors and black spots that ravaged victims' bodies Physicians  And worse, the people turned on each other. Parents abandoned children; husbands turned their backs on their wives.

The Black Death  The streets were filled with the dead, and neighbors sometimes learned of a death next door by the smell.  The symptoms of the Black Death were gruesome:  Tumors covered the body -- some of them as big as an egg or apple

The Black Death  Individuals were nicknamed "God's tokens," because God usually took the sufferer soon after they appeared.  The sick even smelled like they were going to die. Bad breath and odors indicated they were rotting from the inside.

What was it like for a victim of the plague?  It started with a headache. Then chills and fever, which left them exhausted and prostrate. Maybe they experienced nausea, vomiting, back pain, soreness in his arms and legs. Perhaps bright light was too bright to stand.  Within a day or two, the swellings appeared. They were hard, painful, burning lumps on his neck, under his arms, on his inner thighs. Soon they turned black, split open, and began to ooze pus and blood.

Death by numbers  Roughly one third (33%) of Europe’s entire population succumbed between 1346 – 53, somewhere in the region of million people.  The majority of people believed the plague was sent by God, largely as a punishment for sins

Medical Knowledge  Medical knowledge in this period was insufficiently developed for any effective treatments, with many doctors believing the disease was due to ‘miasma’, the pollution of the air with toxic matter from rotting material. This did prompt some attempts to clean up and provide better hygiene – the King of England sent a protest at the filth in London’s streets, and people were afraid of catching the illness from affected corpses – but it didn’t tackle the root cause of rat and flea. Some people seeking answers turned to astrology and blamed a conjunction of the planets.

Disease Pathway  The oriental flea sucks the blood from an infected rat. The bacterium walls off an area in the flea's digestive tract preventing the flea from digesting its blood meal. When the rat sucumbs to the plague, the starving flea leaves its furry host to find a meal in humans instead. When the flea bites into human flesh it regurgitates Y. pestis into the open wound transmitting it to its human host..

“End” of the Plague  The great epidemic ended in 1353, but waves followed it for centuries. However, medical and governmental developments pioneered in Italy had, by the seventeenth century, spread across Europe, providing plague hospitals, health boards and counter-measures; plague consequently decreased, to become unusual in Europe