Hardcore History 13 - Bubonic Nukes

nineteen forty one, a date which will live In infamy, it's history. That's one small step for man. One. I am priest who may have gone. The events that need the flood to say, sort of the vernichtung der Dühnessen Raffle in the... But have five Not quite to the noise the word goes for humanity from this time and place. The figure takes pride in the words Ich bin ein Bielina. Mr. Gorbachev teared down this world. The drama. Marine six. Now it's two.

I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president's a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember But we are not descended from fearful men. ¡Suscríbete al canal! It's hardcore history.

One of my favorite quotes by a historian, and I think it's one of my favorite quotes because it is the way I feel as well, aren't those always, alright. By a historian named David McCullough, he was doing an interview and he said quote History is mostly, it seems to me, a lesson in proportions. You think times are tough? You think you are beset by bad luck? Others have had it worse. Others have gone through worse. Others have triumphed over many more difficult objects.

And the reason why that resonates with me, and I imagine with many of you, is that when I start feeling down about something, my lot in life in one area or another I do go back and read the histories and take comfort and strength from the idea that what I'm going through right now is nothing compared to what people have had to go through. When I was growing up, my father's generation had lived through the depression. And you could see how those people were changed by that experience.

They the so called greatest generation was Marked by that ten or twelve or fourteen years of privation shows you how a generation can be scarred by something that is tragic. And I would look at my father's generation and think to myself that no matter how bad I thought I had it, I wasn't growing up in the depression.

But you need that sort of an attitude that McCullough was talking about there, sort of counting your own blessings when looking back at other people's misfortunes, when you look back at some of the terrible events of history. And that's one of the things about history is it probably is not as terrible as we remember it because just like today's newspapers focus on the bad stuff more than the good stuff.

Cause the bad stuff makes news. History does too. Wars, outbreaks of disease, terrible things tend to make more history than everybody getting along and peacefully enjoying life. But there were some terrible things throughout human history that even reading now just make you feel lucky to be alive in the 21st century.

A perfect example of that Is the issue of disease in modern times. Now, there are parts of the world that are as disease-ridden and unchanged as things were in medieval times, certainly. But by and large, the technologically advanced societies of the modern world have no conception. Of the disease aspect of human existence, the way every generation from the beginning of humankind up until just a generation ago did.

That's a startling concept to think of something that is So a part of the human experience as terrible disease outbreaks, pandemics that took away large percentages of the population, and to realize that we have, thankfully, no experience with that. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about.

In the thirteen forties, A terrible, terrible disease visited itself upon the known world. Maybe even started in the 1330s. Some place in Asia we have reports of almost entire Chinese cities being wiped out. Ninety percent death rates in some of these places. The records are not clear and they're not crisp and they're not. Open to people like me looking at them. But that is believed to be the initial damage caused by something that we now know as the Black Death.

The Black Death was just one of those many plagues that hit humankind over our entire earthly existence, and they were plentiful and usually struck with regularity. But nothing like this plague had ever happened. And maybe it was because human population levels were reaching a certain critical mass. Or maybe it was because transportation had gotten to a point where all these societies were interacting with each other in ways that would allow you to spread disease.

But whatever it was that was wiping out those Chinese cities in the late thirteen thirties, at least most historians think, made its way to the West by the thirteen forties. The initial stories are about death ships showing up from the east at these western ports, with the crews of them either all dead or dead and dying from some pestilence.

And of course what would happen is they would unload their cargo and they would interact with people at the dock, and very quickly this pestilence started spreading all over the Western world, which included the Islamic world and the Catholic world. at a furious pace from all the port areas outward. And very quickly Europe started hitting those same death rates that the Chinese were hitting. Whole cities were wiped out.

Whole towns just disappeared from the map of Europe. They can look at the aerial photos now. And see the outlines of towns that disappeared after the Black Plague, because either they were entirely wiped out, or so much of the populations of these little towns were wiped out so that the people just had to leave. The big cities were carting off hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bodies a day.

The nobility and the rich people were running out to the countryside hoping to escape what they didn't understand. That's another element that started to really scare the people when this disease first hit, is the medieval folks did not understand what was going on. You can understand that disease hits without having any idea what causes disease. They didn't understand the whole idea of bacteria, of course.

They didn't have the tools to rationally realize that they were dealing with something that was contagious in a biomedical sense. Many people thought it was God's will or the devil on earth. And this is where it starts to get interesting to me because when I was a child. There was a lot of literature and uh, you know, television shows and movies about what it might be like after a nuclear war.

I was living during the Cold War, and people talked all the time about the dangers of nuclear war, so it was only logical for people to speculate, well, what might a post nuclear world look like? It's interesting theory. But if you look at Europe. When the Black Death hit it, it's pretty darn close to what would have happened after nuclear exchange. Maybe a neutron bomb exchange, you know, that's the one that doesn't destroy the buildings, it just kills the people. That's kind of what this is.

You wanna see what a post-nuclear world might look like? Look at Europe in 1355. There are

Stories about the human nature element of this that when you hear medieval chroniclers talk about it, you can relate today. And you shake your head and you realize it would be the same way today, and yet it would still be incomprehensible. Let me let me give you an example. One chronicler wrote, quote,

Father, abandoned child, wife, husband, one brother, another, for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died, and none could be found to bury the dead for money or franchise. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could. Without priests, without divine offices, great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead, and they died by the hundreds both day and night.

And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug. And I, Agnalo di Tura, called the fact Buried my five children with my own hands, and there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that they all believed it was the end of the world. Think about that folks.

Think about what we would all be like in a nuclear war's aftermath and realize that these people felt the same sort of shock. The same lack of understanding and began to feel this same sort of fatalistic way that human beings often do in a crisis like that, where they think what will become of us? We're all going to die.

One of the other terrible aspects of the plague for the people and the societies who live through it was the fact that when a society is Shattered the way medieval society was by the plague. You want to congregate in groups. The natural human inclination is to seek companionship and the help and support of your neighbors. That's what we would want to do in a post-nuclear holocaust, right? But the plague scared everyone from congregating with their neighbors.

You were afraid you were gonna get something from them. You were gonna catch the disease. So people kept apart. And it's one of the silent tragedies of the people who had to live through this plague that they had to suffer virtually alone. Again, when you think of the society-wide impacts of all of the individual damage that was caused by this, imagine a society traumatized by loneliness and uncertainty and fear and panic.

you know, a society wide case of post traumatic stress disorder, and you start to understand how much this damaged not just their time period, but even The future. A generation after the plague, a quarter of the people in fifteenth century England didn't marry. Marriage rates were down, a sign of people's pessimism about the future. That's an amazing statistic in that era, and it shows you what sort of individual pessimism abounded.

Barbara Tuckman's got a great book called A Distant Mir. And it's about the fourteenth century, which is the time that the Black Plague hit in Europe. And the effects on society it's not really a book about the Black Plague, but the Black Plague is the The causation method, it's what the whole fourteenth century has to deal with and this these rippling effects from this you know, nuclear war in medieval terms that happens.

There are stories here that sound like they're right out of the Lord of the Rings or Indiana Jones, where chroniclers, surrounded by their dead comrades, write on a piece of parchment words hoping that Some day, someone who finds humankind hopefully alive again will read them. Tuckman writes his name was Brother John Klein, in Kilkenny, Ireland. He left a record. Lest quote. Things which should be remembered perish with time and vanish from the memory of those who came after us.

Sensing, she writes, quote that the whole world, as it were, placed within the grasp of the evil one, I leave parchment to continue this work. If perchance any man survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun. Tuckman says, Brother John, as noted by another hand, died of the pestilence, but he foiled oblivion.

That is a Lord of the Rings moment, isn't it? This last priest writes down something for any humans that might survive this pestilence. And the last written sentence ended us in another handwriting saying Brother John died of the disease. But think about what that meant. These people thought the end of the world had come.

And if you realize what the mass effect of a lot of people thinking that the end of the world had come might have on society, you begin to see what happened to Europe in the 14th century. This was something that we used to talk about in the post apocalyptic scenarios that were thought about about what would happen after a nuclear war. If people thought they were all going to die in a short period of time, how would their behavior change?

Would society completely break down? Because that's what happened to the survivor. of the first hit of the plague.'Cause we should point out that one of the real tragedies of the fourteenth century is that when this plague first appeared and caused this great mortality, it came back. Several times afterwards, almost as if it came back to make sure it got the people that survived last time.

But this bred a terrible pessimism among people. You can look at the art of the period, which is a window to the psyche of these people, and you can see all of a sudden death is in a lot of the pictures. He's pictured, he's talked about. There's a a real pessimism about what religion can do for you. Lot of these people when the great mortality started.

Turned to holy relics and prayers and all sorts of things that they thought would help them. And when they died anyway or they saw their loved ones die anyway, it shook their morale and their confidence in the world order of things. And that's not true. Yeah. Society began to break down, and one of the ways it broke down is the people who were left living had no confidence that that life was gonna last very long, which changed their behavior.

Fewer were told you only had a month to live, and so did everyone else. A comet is gonna hit the earth in a month and we'll all be dead. Do you change the way you live? Of course you do. Do rules mean as much anymore? Maybe not.

Now this would end up having Some positive effects down the road, too. That's the strange thing about human history. Even something as negative and tragic as the one of the worst pestilences in the history of the world played such a role in history that positive things came out of this too. So try telling that to the people who live through it. First of all, you have to imagine a society that is shattered. Imagine what math.

grief and suffering does to a society. Imagine people who are ripped away from their family, their family's completely dead, and here they are left alive in this strange, you know, post plague world, lonely. Post-traumatic stress disordered, probably. And without the will to rebuild, Barbara Tuckman again had a great line about what European society was like after the plague. She said that Europe and to some degree a lot of the world was exhausted by the deaths and the sorrows.

Most of us have been through terrible grief at one time in our lives, and the recovery period that comes after that. Think about how personally devastating that can be, and how it can exhaust you and Kill your incentive and your optimism for a time. Well now imagine everyone left alive having that same problem at the same time. You can see why it would have been hard for society to just bounce back.

And then just when you think you're bouncing back, another plague comes a couple years later and then another one a couple years after that, society was hammered. down. And a lot of the ideas of people like Thomas Malthus look at this period as a perfect example of the Malthusian theory of population control. Malthus was one of these guys that believed if you get too many people and society gets too big and you can't feed them all, eventually nature will cull the population.

And things like the Black Death seem to be a perfect example of Malthus's ideas in action. I mean the population of England, which was overpopulated, to be fair, before the Black Plague, at six million people. Fell to two million people in a few years. Imagine if that happened to the society you're in right now.

And for a time there were people who benefited from this. As I said, there were strange positive benefits from this terrible. I mean, imagine saying that good things came out of that nuclear war where half the human population died. It's hard to imagine. But the Black Plague had a way of destroying the body. you know, hierarchically structured back in those days. It opened up a system that was not openable before.

For example, before the Black Plague in Europe, you had a system that was rigidly stratified. You had peasants and you had nobility, and never did the two meet, and peasants had no rights, and it was A world of very limited mobility. The extreme number, though, of deaths caused by the Black Plague created labor shortages in a world where labor was the principal form of energy. Imagine oil shortages now, or electrical shortages.

Well, there were labor shortages, which meant that these people, these despised laborers, these serfs, these people that the nobility in the blue bloods never gave the time a day to. All of a sudden had a lot more bargaining power than they'd ever had before in a very short period of time. It created revolutionary conditions in a society that was used to people having no rights at the labor level, all of a sudden having rights. And the ability to demand things.

Because without them, what are you gonna do? And society's in a catastrophic situation. Now, in a society based on the sort of rigid hierarchy that medieval society was, the aristocracy and the elites were not just going to take. The economic situation sitting down. They weren't used to the demands of the lower classes, and the way they responded were with strict laws that simply would act as though the conditions that the plagues, you know, culling of the population had caused.

The laws were just gonna pretend that that didn't matter. In England, they passed laws that would prevent people from seeking higher wages. They would pass laws that prevented employers from paying higher wages. You couldn't look for a new job, and you couldn't be without a job,'cause the law said that if you were trying to beg or were not working, you could simply be grabbed by the nearest person on the street and they could put you to work.

In 1381, there was a peasants' revolt in England. A peasants revolt that virtually every historian traces to the conditions caused by the Black Plague. And it came within an eyelash of overthrowing the English monarch. And it was led by peasants and radical clergymen, and a lot of historians believe had it succeeded, you would have had some sort of Christian socialism in 14th century England. How wild is that?

But it shows you how much this unbelievable disease had ripped apart the structures of these societies that had seemed so stable beforehand. It had upset the Apple car. It had killed so many people that everything was up for grabs again. Not just that.

In Western Europe, there was almost no available land for new people. That all changed when everybody died. With forty percent of the population dead, all of a sudden peasants who owned nothing of their own were moving on to land that the people who owned before had died. They were moving into the houses that had been abandoned by people who were no longer living. For a little bit of time, they lived pretty high on the hog.

Until the labor shortage began to be dwarfed by the larger problem, which was No one was gonna be around, labor or otherwise. These fields Many of them in England that had been so laboriously cultivated, where the forest had been cut back, where nature had been tamed, many of them reverted right back to England. There were many, many more active farms and cultivations going on in thirteen hundred than in fifteen hundred.

And it's because there were more people to work the land. Six million people to two million people in a very short period of time, and England's population doesn't rebound, for example, until Seventeen hundred at least. Think about that. And we talk about England a lot because we have English records.

That we can look at, but many places were hit very hard. Italy was very hard hit. And a lot of people trace the Renaissance to a lot of what happened because of the Black Plague. I'll give you an example of what I mean. One of the effects of the black plague was that the clergy of Europe

suffered at about the same rates as the population. The clergy had a very important role in medieval Europe. Everything from practically being a doctor to practically being a lawyer and notary public. You needed a priest for a lot of things back then. And when people started dying They called priests. Now a couple of things used to happen. Some of the times the priest came and died.

Other times, out of fear, the priests wouldn't come, which gave them a bad reputation. When the family needed them the most, they proved to be human beings and avoided some of these families. The Pope at the time. was compelled to give mass absolutions and allow citizens to give the last rites to other citizens because there just weren't enough priests and sometimes the priests didn't want to go and do what they had to do because it was a death sentence.

But so many priests did die. Imagine the scribes in Egypt all dying. Or imagine all of the people involved in the bureaucracy here in modern times dying. Well, you have to replace them, don't you? And what society did is another fascinating response if you want to think about that nuclear war idea again. Imagine whole generations are wiped out. Well

It's gonna be a human thing to speed up the process of rebuilding your society. And one of the ways you do that is by drafting younger and younger people into it. If you look at medieval society after the plague First thing you're gonna notice is all of a sudden younger and younger people are filling these important roles. Imagine in our society if all of a sudden there were so few doctors that we started lowering the age.

and the experience level required to be a doctor,'cause we needed so many of them, and all of a sudden you had a bunch of twenty year old doctors running around, or nineteen year old US senators running around. Society got younger, but there was a problem Across the board.

One of the things that happens when society gets younger is that you don't necessarily do your job as well because you lack experience. In addition, the quick influx of people into these new jobs, for example, the commissioning of mass numbers of clergymen oftentimes simply people whose whole families had been killed by the plague, who had nowhere else to go, created a clergy that was oftentimes not as committed as the spiritual people who

preceded them. Many of those people spent their whole life and devotion to the clergy. The people that replaced them oftentimes had been you know, fast track through it in a few months, weren't necessarily as committed, were not as educated, oftentimes were more corrupt, and oftentimes gave the clergy a bad name. over a hundred, two hundred years to where the clergy got a very bad reputation for the abuses and excesses and lack of high standards because

Many of their best had been wiped out in the plague. And that dissatis satisfaction led to a lot of the complaints that Martin Luther nailed up on that door in that famous incident that marked the beginning of Protestant is Protestantism and the break with the Catholic Church.

Now, if you happen to be a Protestant, maybe you consider that to be one of the benefits of the Black Plague personally. Now, one of the problems that made something like the Black Plague much more upsetting to people then than would be the case now is that they had no conception of where it came from.

They had no idea what was going on in the way that we would understand what was going on today. We would say today, well gee, this germ has arisen or this disease has broken out, and we would send our scientists to start working on it right away. They didn't know what Some people went off the deep end with quackery and mysticism, where they tried to find something that would help them deal with this. I think we do a lot of that today, by the way.

Many people adopted a, you know, live for today attitude. There were orgies and rapes and robberies and killings and all sorts of upsetting things in society by people who figured they had nothing to lose. And this by the way had an effect on society that again opened it up. Because people who only a decade previously would have kept their place for fear of what might happen to them if they protested their working conditions, for example.

Felt more empowered because after all, what did they have to lose? Probably all gonna be dead in a month or two or three anyway, probably already lost their families, or many of them, as I said, exhausted by grief these people. Not much left to lose. Barbara Tuckman again said that from all of this Terribleness, I'm paraphrasing here, modern man may have been born because of the black plague.

This idea that God didn't create this social hierarchy where people who were born in the blue blood class should be ruling everybody else, but this idea that maybe just maybe, that didn't matter so much and that the mindset of medieval times which In the minds of a peasant, for example, saw that as a well ordered world and a good thing and okay, started seeing that as a travesty, and as Barbara Tuckman said, that starts leading you down all kinds of roads and ideas.

That may lead to more modern man and ideas of equality and merit as opposed to, you know, who were your parents. Bad things that occurred due to the Black Plague that there's no way to go into all of them. As I said, Barbara Tuckman's book is a wonderful example of you know, I think it should have been called growing up in a post plague world, but she called it a distant mirror instead.

But it shows so many of the side effects of what happens when society breaks down. For example, in the aftermath of the plague, and especially while it was going on, people looked for scapegoats. To explain the terrible situation they were in. Especially when you don't understand the whole idea of bacteria and disease as we understand it now. It's easy to go around looking for people to blame, and in medieval Europe.

The people that suffered the most from the plague were undoubtedly the Jewish population. What happened to the Jews? In the plague era in Europe is probably second only to the Holocaust of the Second World War era, as far as the horribleness to the Jewish population.

The reading makes tears well up in your eyes, the terrible things that were done. The Jews were accused of poisoning the wells, for example, in Europe. And many bought into the idea that the reason people were getting sick and dying was because the Jews had poisoned the wells.

Some were saying, in an attempt to take over the Christian world, imagine if you just had your children carted away because of whatever this thing was that was killing everybody, and then you found out that this alien population that lived in a town across the river did. the things that were done in retaliation to this crime that never happened were horrible.

And not just Jews, but also people who were diseased already, the lepers of Europe suffered terribly, because of course people were looking for who may have spread this disease and then you find a diseased person. Plus you think maybe wiping out the disease people would help stop spread the disease. There were terrible, terrible things done during the plague to all sorts of populations that were deemed different or diseased or any number of other things. People blame other people.

Sometimes when society breaks down. Wanna see what it might look like in a post-nuclear Holocaust world? Head back to the late thirteen forties in Europe and get an advanced preview from the past.

So the Black Death, as we've called whatever it was, the Great Pestilence, the Great Mortality, as the people of the day called it, whatever that was, it and its subsequent outbreaks every couple of years for a while. carted away an estimated seventy five million people. Now we don't know how many it really killed.

Tons of out-of-the-way farms and towns and cities that never had any death counts or nothing reported, but they estimate about seventy-five million dead in a world that probably numbered just a little bit more than twice that. May have killed up to half of Europe's population. Now many people will look at something like the Black Death and say, Whew, thank goodness I don't live in medieval. Boy, they had it rough back then, but that was a long time ago and we've come a long way since.

But while World War One was still raging, the last year of World War One, which of course was a very modern war by nineteen eighteen The American service personnel that were training in camps in the United States. Started coming down with an illness. And when I say started coming down with an illness, I mean in one day they had nothing, and the next day lots of people are sick. It was a legitimate disease outbreak from nowhere. And it quickly spread through the US Army camps.

And whatever this disease was Was pretty nasty and swept through the populations in a sort of a quick and light way. And the people at the time certainly felt. Like they had dodged a bullet, that what they dealt with had been bad, but could have been a lot worse. Fast forward a couple of months, and it comes back. in a more virulent form. And all of a sudden. The modern world is contending with a modern disease outbreak. The fact that there was a war going on and that there was

A relatively modern transportation system in place. Think about now, ladies and gentlemen, if you had a disease outbreak on a huge scale, how quickly it could get from place to place.

with airlines and all the globalization we have. Well, the first World War era was one of these eras where a version of globalization was also taking place. So these diseases quickly spread and this virulence Respiratory illness that has come down into history to be known as the Spanish influenza swept all over the world in a very short period of time, and it was lethal.

Up to twenty percent of the world's population may have contracted it. Between 2.5 and 5% of the world's population died from it. It is considered to be the worst pandemic in the history of the world. Now that's because of the raw numbers that were killed. Somewhere between forty and a hundred million died, as far as anyone knows from the Spanish influenza.

But as a percentage of the population, it certainly didn't do to s the societies what the Black Death did. It wasn't killing off half the people. Nevertheless, it's interesting to look and see what effect the Spanish influenza had on the societies at the time. First of all, there are all sorts of theories about what it did to the war effort. Because it weakened the Allies.

But it may have even weakened the German army even more because they had worse rations, their troops were more poorly fed, and they were more prime to be struck by disease. There are all sorts of theories on how the Spanish influenza outbreak may have impacted whole other areas of history that you might not expect. It certainly was one of those things that provoked the same sort of

Response among the population that the plague did. There was a sort of a fear and panic. Some people thought maybe this was really a secret weapon that the Germans had introduced. Germ warfare. You had people becoming afraid of their neighbors. There were stories of stores and whole business districts shutting down and just pushing merchandise out the door and shutting the door, you know, people wearing masks all over the American cities at least.

There are photos you can look at online of whole hospital wards as far as the eye can see filled with people in beds because they've got this disease. And the Spanish influenza was strange because normally with these respiratory diseases, they strike the very young and the very old. The Spanish influenza happened to hit the twenty to forty five crowd.

The productive members that really ran the societies. So when those people came down with the illness, and when everybody became scared to go about their daily lives lest they get the illness, whole American cities were shutting down.

Things just weren't getting done. But the truth of the matter is that for less than a year, this disease was out there and it killed maybe a hundred million people. In your grandfather's age, in an age where we understood biomedicine, we understood the germ spread disease. We understood how you prevented contact. And we had doctors with relatively modern medicine that could work to cure it, and yet this disease killed a hundred million people, maybe. I've heard it said that

This disease, the Spanish influenza, killed as many people in twenty five weeks as AIDS has killed in twenty five years. Maybe that will put it in perspective. And age is a good thing to Use as a comparison with some of these old plagues, because a plague it certainly is. But the difference is, is that because its actions move so slowly, society has more time to prepare for the damage it's gonna do.

I'm sure that's small comfort to the people who have to deal with it and the places that have been impacted by it in places like Africa. But imagine all those AIDS deaths happening in a year. And you start to see how different it would be for society that wouldn't have had time to prepare for the damage. And it leaves you shell shocked in a way that something like AIDS doesn't, because again, you have time to become accustomed to the idea as a society.

to plan countermeasures, to work on medical options. When something like the Spanish influenza hits you and you have a matter of weeks to work on scientific breakthroughs. Well let's just say it's a different situation. Society has not had to deal with anything like this in a long time. Now, that doesn't mean it won't again. I read a story just the other day about how Spanish influenza germ.

has been found in frozen bodies in some places. I think it was a frozen woman's body in Alaska from that era, and they were able to get a sample of the Of a cell, I guess it was, from this disease. or a disease cell from the Spanish influenza, take it in the laboratory and start looking at it and finding things out about it. And it's a combination of fascinating Because how interesting to finally find out with medical science's current techniques what this was in nineteen eighteen.

Scientists now believe that the Spanish influenza may have been mutated from birds originally, that it may have a lot in common with some of the modern avian bird flus that we're worried about today. So there's a modern connection to the nineteen eighteen pandemic.

Give you some clues maybe as to how it arose. We certainly know more now about how it killed its victims than they did then, because of what we've found. At the same time There's almost a Jurassic Park type worry that you might be bringing back to life a killer from the past. You see this with the smallpox germ as well. Many people don't realize that smallpox is one of the greatest killers throughout history. Many of these famous plays.

that we don't know what was involved. You know, they called it a pestilence and they give you some symptoms and we scratch our head now wondering what modern disease Athens might have had, you know, during the Peloponnesian War, for example. But a likely candidate in every case is smallpox, one of the greatest killers of humankind of all time, as a germ.

There are still samples of smallpox out there. There are laboratories and government agencies that have, you know, a precious sample of smallpox and it's heavily guarded and kept under wraps and, you know, a million different Things put into place to make sure that it never gets out on the open market or out in the world again. And yet you can't help but feel that.

combination of Murphy's Law and the statistical probabilities make you think that somewhere, somehow, one day We could have a whoops situation on our hands, and one of these old fashioned killers that all of our ancestors throughout human history would have dealt with and we'll be dealing with it ourselves.

You could think of terrorism as a way this could happen. You could think of a Jurassic Park situation where disease from the past just gets out, or There are new diseases that crop up after all the Spanish influenza. was unknown until it appeared. New diseases do arise. And then, of course, I read a story the other day about a German firm that had managed to give a little switch

To an animal, and all of a sudden this animal could now get a disease from another animal species that it was immune to before. Well, that's the sort of technology that if A mistake happened, we humans could start getting diseases from animals that we've been immune to throughout human history. Another possible way we could experience the pandemics that our ancestors were so familiar with.

The Black Plague, folks, had a huge effect upon his If it had never happened, it's interesting to speculate all the differences that might have occurred. I've heard all sorts of theories. How England might have conquered France because of the role the plague played in both those nations' histories and weakening both of them. I've heard ideas that maybe the Catholic Church never has the schism.

And you never have the Protestant-Catholic wars that follow from that, and you don't have a separate church today without the Black Plague.

I've even heard theories that say that the Black Plague contributed to climactic differences. During that period there was something that occurred called the Little Ice Age. And there are some theories that say that the The return of so many farms that were owned by people who died in the plague to nature ended up throwing enough pollen into the air in a short period of time as to cool the earth for a while.

Seems a little far fetched to me, but again it shows you how the scope of what the Black Plague did was so large that you even start looking at climatic changes that might have resulted from it. It's also interesting, I think, to study two other elements of this.

In the same way that it would be interesting to find out how society today would respond in a catastrophic situation like a post-nuclear holocaust, you can do that by studying how people have contended with similar situations in the past. Those people in the 14th century that were dealing with fifty or sixty or seventy percent mortality rates where they lived from the Black Plague. are as human as we are today. And

It's not too far-fetched to suggest that many of the things that they did in the wake of that catastrophe, we would do again in the wake of any modern one. We can learn from how people responded.

And we can ask ourselves: with all of the modern technology at our disposal today, the combination of both understanding disease better so that we wouldn't think that it was an act of God But at the same time have that balanced out by the air travel and all the interconnectivity in our societies that would allow such a disease to spread even quicker, might we fare any better in the long run with a virulent outbreak in the modern world?

Well, one thing's for sure. The plagues from the past may be what saves us from the plagues in the future. The changes to human DNA caused by pestilences in the past may provide enough. Of an immunity to help us deal with future outbreaks. I'll give you an example of what I mean. Scientists now believe that. About 10% of the European population may be immune to the HIV virus. And they believe that this immunity stems from some ancestor in their past who survived the Black Plague.

Maybe the strugglings and the sufferings of the people of the past may help us weather the storms of the future. One thing's for sure. The more I think about what those people had to deal with, the more I'm happier with my own lot here in the twenty first century. If you would like to help spread the word about hardcore history, vote for the show on podcastalley.com.