Towards the beginning of spring, the doleful effects of the pestilence began to be horribly apparent by symptoms. An issue of blood from the nose was a manifest sign of inevitable death. But in men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumors in the groin or armpits, some of which grew as large as
a common apple. From the two said parts of the body, it soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions, after which the form changed, black spots making their appearance in many cases on the arm, or thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, then minute and numerous, Almost.
All within three days from the.
Appearance of said symptoms, sooner or later died. Many dropped at in the open streets by day and night, whilst a great many others, though dying in their own homes, drew their neighbour's attention to the fact, more by the smell of their rotting corpses than by any other means. And what with these and the others who were dying all over the city, bodies were here, there and everywhere. It was not merely a question of one citizen avoiding another.
This scourge had implanted such a great terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases, wives deserted husbands. But even worse and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.
Oh, yeah, that was so hard for me to remain quiet while you recorded that.
Yeah.
So that is from everyone's favorite plague chronicler, which everyone has a favorite play of course, right, yeah, Giovanni Boccaccio, I think.
That's how you say.
It sounds right, who.
Was living in Florence during the time of the Black Death? Wow, And so he wrote a book called The Decameron based on what he saw, and that was just one of the little bits in there, according to other contemporary accounts.
Quite accurate.
Oh my god, So hi everybody, Hi, welcome to episode five.
Yes, oh, this podcast will kill you. Yeah, it really will today. Yeah, and you know what we haven't done yet, I realized tell me said our last names? Oh my god, you're right, Yeah, we're always like.
I'm Erin and I'm also Aaron.
Well it turns out I'm Aaron Welsh.
And I'm also Aaron Alman Updyke.
So yeah, we wanted to.
I mean, we should have introduced ourselves earlier.
Maybe.
Well, if you've made it this far, it's nice to meet you.
Yeah, thanks for listening.
Can I just tell you how excited I am to talk about.
I know how excited you are.
This is the one, this is the disease.
They got me into epidemiology, into disease, ecology, into history.
I'm thrilled.
I just am so excited based on how excited you are, like, regardless of how much you know, Like, your excitement is through the roof, and that thrills me. Ya.
And so this week we're going to do something a little bit different and next week also so because plague is such a beast of a topic and has been all over the news lately, yeh, we're going to be splitting this up into two episodes to give at the time that it deserves.
Yeah. Yeah, plague is deserving of multiple episodes.
And this week we'll be focusing on the biology of plague and then tracing its history up into the twentieth century. Yeah, and then next week we'll talk about the impact of plague in the last one hundred and twenty years or so, and then fill you in on what's been.
Going on in Madagascar.
Yep.
And don't worry.
Each week we'll be drinking quarantinies. Oh yeah, slightly different ones. Speaking of which, what are we drinking this week?
Quarantiny time, Quarantini time, yay. This week we're drinking the Boobo baby right, Boobo babyda?
Yeah? And what is in the Bubo Babyda.
It's essentially an extra dry martini. Okay, it's pretty thrilling. This is a gin martini. So if you'd like to drink along at home, go ahead and mix one and three quarters ounces of your favorite gin. My favorite is Hendrix, and you mix that with a quarter ounce of Driver Mooth and then a hefty splash of the juice from cocktail onions.
And we're doing cocktail onions because.
They look the most like boobos, which you'll learn all about and it's disgusting.
But hey, okay, so speaking of boobos, yes.
I want to know about the biology and the symptomology and all that good stuff about plague.
I can't wait to tell you. I'm really excited to talk about plague today because this is our first real zoonotic disease and vector born and offers vector born disease. So that's really exciting for me, and I would guess for you too, since weird disease ecologists and so this type of disease is what's really exciting to us.
And we also both study vector born.
Diseases exactly right. If you are not aware, A zoonotic disease is essentially a disease that generally circulates in animal populations and often spills over into human populations, and a vector born disease is a disease such as, for example, malaria, that is transmitted by an insect, vector in the case of plague, is transmitted by the humble flea Ugh, I'm gonna say some things that actually might make you have
some sympathy for the fleas. No, Lie, I didn't think it was possible, but as I was reading, I kind of felt bad for fleas.
I'm going to keep an open mind, keep an open mind, and wait to be convinced.
So let's go through the life cycle of plague. So plague is caused by a bacterium called Yourcinia pestis, which likely evolved to be a blood borne pathogen quite a long time ago. And I'm assuming you'll talk a bit more about the evolutionary history of this disease. Yeah, cool, So we won't get into that now. But what's really interesting is the life cycle of plague. Here's how it happens.
A flea takes a blood meal from an infected let's call it a rat because those are really common, yeah, And the amount of bacteria that is in the rat's blood directly correlates with the percentage of fleas that get infected. Not all fleas are going to get infected, but usually at least around thirty percent of fleas that are feeding on a rat will get infected. And if you think of a common rat, it's got more than a few fleas on.
It, right, Yeah, lots and lots and lots.
Exactly, so a good proportion of those fleas end up getting infected. What happens is your Cinea pestis travels to the flea's stomach, where it starts multiplying and multiplying and multiplying, and within three to nine days after taking that infected blood meal. The bacteria have multiplied so much that they entirely block the esophagus of the flea. Oh my gosh, isn't that the craziest thing.
That's disgusting.
So then this poor flea is so hungry it tries to take another blood meal from another rat, but it can't because its esophagus is completely blocked, and so gobs and gobs of bacteria are blocking the entrance into the stomach. As it tries and fails to take a blood meal, it ends up regurgitating a mixture of blood and bacteria
back into the rat. It's amazing, it's so cool. And what's sad, and this is why you should have a little bit of empathy for the flea, is that that block flea will end up dying of starvation and dehydration.
Only after bringing the world to its knees.
Well, you know, it's just one humble flea. But it's suggested that it has barfed eleven thousand to twenty four thousand individual basillie into its new host.
Which is insane considering that in some like the infective dose, the number of bacteria needed to cause it infection is one.
Yeah, incas exactly one it's crazy.
So just one little vomitorious.
You could infect twenty four thousand rats. In theory, I guess in the mammalian host, your Sinnia pestis will spread from the bite wound into the lymph system, the lymphatics underneath the skin, and then it will travel to the lymph nodes where it will replicate and replicate and replicate. Eventually that infection can then spread to the bloodstream, it can spread to your liver, your spleen, and other organs.
And so that is sort of the general life cycle until another flea bites you and the cycle begins again. Isn't that cool?
That's super cool.
It's really fun. So that's generally how the disease circulates in its enzootic hosts, which means the host that it generally circulates in in the natural environment.
Okay, so that's basically rodents for the most part.
For the most part, rodents, and different species of rodents have different susceptibility to it. But if you think of I believe its name is Rattus ratus. The common it is sewer rat, right, black rat, black rat, city rat.
There are some other species of rat that are common in North America.
Right, it's the Norway rat for instance. Yeah, bigger and browner.
Oh cool. Yeah, But so most species of rodent have at least some susceptibility to it. But whether or not they're gonna have extreme symptoms and end up dying, like for example, prairie dogs, or they'll be able to sustain a mild infection, such as sewer rats. It varies. But what's really interesting is that over two hundred mammalian species are known to be naturally infected with plague, naturally infected, naturally infected, So rodents are the most important hosts, but
they're by no means the only host. Rodents are likely the most important in part because they have a very short life span a high replacement rate, so they're reproducing very rapidly, and they have a generally long breeding season. And additionally, it's likely that this bacterium evolved with these rodents, and so there is only mild resistance in the majority of these rodent species, if that makes sense, I think so.
So these rodents serve to be really good hosts to maintain infection in a given area, and then other hosts like for example, cats, can amplify the disease and allow for it to spread to other victims.
Is that because the proximity of cats to crazy humans who have cats, that is certainly no offense to all of our cat owning.
Listeners like me, for example, That is certainly possible. Yeah, so that's sort of the life cycle of the plague. But that's all in animals.
Yeah, I want to hear about it in humans. I do to the good stuff.
I want to get to the good stuff. I mean, that was good stuff.
No, I know, I really liked it.
So the plague in humans, there's three different forms of plague. The first is the boobonic, the famous, the most famous, most likely that you've heard of it. It's what we named our drink after Boobo, the boobonic plague. This plague is caused when a human is infected via the bite of an infected flea. So it's not dissimilar from what we discussed in the animal cycle. A flea bites you, barfs a whole bunch of bacteria into your blood, and
that's how you get infected. Those bacteria travel through your lymph system to your lymph nodes, most commonly the ones in your armpit or your groin and then the bacteria multiply a whole bunch of times there and it forms what's called a boobo, which is essentially a giant infected lymph node full of bacteria.
Oh did you know that?
In And I'm going to talk a lot about the Black Death in a bit, but did you know that? During the Black Death? One of the things that people wrote about in regards to boobos was that they made gurgling noises.
Oh like like yeah, like the bubos were speaking.
Oh my god, that's disgusting.
I need to hear it.
I would love to hear that. Actually, I wonder if there's recordings on YouTube or something.
So I'm not sure if this has ever been replicated in modern events, but I want to know.
I know it would be really cool.
Gurgling booby might just be.
Those medieval exaggerators hyperbolizers.
I mean, yeah, what did they think the world was ending or something?
So the incubation period for the bubonic plague is generally around one to seven days. It has a pretty large variation, and in addition to those characteristic boobos, you also have some general signs like fever, chills, head and body aches, vomiting and nausea is very common with the bubonic plague.
So pretty generalized at the beginning.
Generalized except for that very characteristic bubo. Right. However, not everyone who gets infected with the plague is going to end up with bubos. There are two other forms of the disease.
Oh yeah.
The first that I'll talk about briefly is septacemic. Okay, So sepsis is a disease that can actually happen with any infection. It's essentially just an overload of bacteria in your blood stream, specifically and with bubonic plague. Bubonic plague can spread to the blood stream from the lymphatics and
then become septocemic plague. However, it's also possible to get primary septiscemic plague, which means that you have an overload of bacteria, a very high bacterial load in your bloodstream without any characteristic boobos.
Could a person get septiscemic plague, for instance, somehow, either via a flea or via contact with an infected individual, get bacteria deposited directly into their bloodstream through like an open wound.
Yes, that's certainly possible, okay, And there may be differences in that different species of flea feed differently. There's not a lot of information on the various species of flea and how they transmit, but it is certainly possible that you can get infected directly through your bloodstream from the bite of a flea. It is also possible to get infected from so the advanced stages of bubonic plague can end with open sores. Your boobos open up and they're
just whoo like oozing seeping bacteria. But human to human transmission of bubonic plague is very, very limited. You'd have to have a ton of contact with that bubo to really get infected. That wabonic plague exactly. Bubonic Okay. That is in contrast to pneumonic Oh yeah, which I know is your favorite.
Well favorite is favorite is a tricky word, too strong of a word. Maybe it's the most terrifying to me.
It is the most virulent form of the disease. Mneumonic plague, which means that it has infected your lungs is transmitted via respiratory droplets. It is quite high. So for bubonic plague the mortality rate is between thirty to sixty percent, and for septiscemic untreated yes, and for septocemic plague, it's on the high end, maybe eighty or ninety percent, but pneumonic plague, if untreated, is almost one hundred percent fatal. It's really sad. Yeah, So mneumonic plague again means that
it was transmitted via respiratory droplets. So bubonic plague, if it spreads to your lungs, can become mnemonic plague. But what's scary about pneumonic plague is that it can also be transmitted directly human to human via respiratory droplets. Uh oh yeah, like the flu, like the flu, like smallpox, like so many other diseases that we've seen. So with pneumonic plague, the incubation period here in some cases can
be as short as twenty four hours. And again the untreated fatality rate is almost one hundred percent.
And remind our listeners, incubation period is.
Incubation period is the time from when you become infected to when you show symptoms.
Okay, and so with pneumonic plague.
It can be as little as twenty four hours, very soon, very short. And what's really sad is that you can also die within that amount of time, so it takes over your body very rapidly. It encompasses very severe respiratory symptoms, including shortness of breath and costing. Initially the cough will be dry, but over time, oh no, it will become very productive. That's what we call it productive cough, meaning you're coughing up gunk from your lungs bhlm, phlem, but
mostly blood and bacteria. Whoa. So the one good thing about the mnemonic plague, there's a good thing about it, surprisingly, yes, is that it is most infectious at the end stage of the disease.
Okay.
And so if you're treating someone or caring for someone who has pneumonic plague and they've just come down with symptoms, you may still be okay, yes.
As long as you just abandon them right before they die.
Abandon them before they die, just kidding. Wear a mask.
Oh that that's an alternative.
That's an alternative. Abandon them or wear a mask. But yeah, you're most infectious during the last few hours, especially of your disease. However, what's scary is that you also remain infectious after you die. What so, people who are preparing bodies for burial, for example, can become infected by close contact with the body because their body is still full of bacteria, and that bacteria is still alive.
And all it takes is just a couple bacteria exactly.
Ooh yeah, So that's a little bit scary.
That's rough.
The other good news is that all of the plague is treatable with antibiotics as long as you catch it early enough.
Caveat.
That's the big caveat, And we'll talk a lot about that when we talk about what's going on with plague today.
Yeah.
Are you ready to learn about the history? I literally can't wait. There's a lot of ground to cover here.
Oh my god, So just jump in all right.
The plague Bacterium likely evolved as a human pathogen during the time when agriculture and large stationary human settlements became widespread, which was about five ten thousand years ago. That's for the plague jumping into humans.
Awesome.
Are you noticing a pattern yet?
By the way, every disease is from the agriculture revolution.
All of the diseases that we've discussed so far, and probably many in the future, have emerged as a result of farming and human crowding. The invention of agriculture was great for humans in many ways. It allowed us to have some degree of food security, which could support larger populations, and then we could have division of labor, governments, more time for creative output, art trade, basically the things that.
We think of being human.
Right. Humans weren't the only ones that were positively impacted by this new way of life.
Oh yeah, who else?
Oh yeah?
The domestication of livestock and long term storage of grains and other food meant that humans were living in close proximity to animals and a pathogens.
Do you know who else.
Loves piles and piles of grains?
I can guess.
Well, your husband should know, aaron, he were temporary.
He does, So what is it? It's rats and mice and rodents?
Ye, rodent.
They just got a cat, so they no longer have that problem.
That's great, but cats can still give you mnemonic plagus.
Well you know, but whatever.
Do you know who loves rodents? They're fleas?
Oh yeah.
When humans domesticated livestock and began growing crops, some rodents were basically domesticated alongside livestock, though less intentionally. Rats and mice started living alongside humans, adapting to live in the nooks. And crannies of houses and food storage built, and they became a constant fixture. They were everywhere all the time wherever humans went, so did the rats and their fleas and their fleas bacteria. Yeah, and the more humans, the more rats, and.
The more rats, the more fleas, and the more fleas, the more plague. You got it, I understand this cycle.
But what about the plague bacterium.
Well, the plague bacterium jumped from harmless little beet pop to destroyer of worlds in Central Asia right as farming was taking off. The plague bacterium doesn't just reside in so called domestic rodents, as you learn from.
The biology just a little bit ago.
It also thrives in many, many species of wild rodent. And it's thought that wild rodents were where the plague bacterium turned pathogen.
Oh wow. Yeah.
The favorable climate and newly adopting farming practices of humans led to.
Huge population growth.
For the first time, cities could sustain themselves, and wide scale travel for trade in crease. As human populations grew, they expanded into natural areas, which made them and domestic rats basically neighbors with these wild plague bearing rodents and fleas were happy to jump from wild to domestic rat and vice versa. Oh yeah, taking with them their pathogens, and this is how humans were likely first exposed to
the plague bacterium. As a side note, an increase in disease following human encroachment on natural areas has been seen time and time again. Yeah, spikes in disease or emergence of zoonotic disease following deforestation or ecological upheaval are super common, and we're definitely going to be addressing them in future episodes.
Definitely, especially when we talk about things like ebola for example.
Yeah, that's a big one. Yeah. Back to plague.
All right, so we've established how the plague got into humans in the first place, but what did it do once it was there?
Kill them all?
Yeah? Spoilers.
Well, the answer is that it probably in the beginning caused local small epidemics. It bided its time, waiting until the black rat, who was the main reservoir for the plague bacteria and plague's flea host, had reached a near global distribution.
Wow, and then it struck.
The first time we see plague, where it's ugly little head is in five hundred and forty one to five hundred and forty two a d wow a while ago in what is called the Plague of Justinian, named after the guy who was Roman emperor at the time in the East Roman Empire.
You know what's crazy. If this thing jumped and was able to infect mammals ten thousand years ago, that means it spent eight thousand years just hanging out, not really killing people all that much.
Well, it might just be that there are gaps in the historical record.
I would I bet that's probably true.
So similar to colera, this doesn't leave any mark on bone or skeleton, and so the evidence would be harder to detect.
Cool, So it's only one we have sort of written records that say this is totally plague.
Guys.
Yeah, that's when we know for sure that this was happening to people.
Well, and even then it's disputed sometimes whether the disease is plague or another pathogens.
Well, I guess those are kind of you can see the symptoms are very different, but this is a lot of this is generalized symptoms.
So right, and so in the Plague of Justinian, the reason that they think that it was actually bubonic plague is because they're described the bubos.
Oh I can't wait. Okay, tell me all about it.
Okay, yeah, the Plague of Justinian. This one is a doozy ooh good.
About twenty five to fifty million people died during this pandemic.
Yep in five hundred AD.
I literally didn't know there were that many humans at that point.
It was remarkable, the devastation. Remember the nineteen eighteen influenza. Everyone, I do fifty to one hundred million people die then, which is a lot of people, about an estimated three to six percent of the global population. In the Plague of Justinian, at least thirteen percent of the global population died. And that's without the disease reaching global distribution. What if it had, that number would be a lot higher.
So where was it limited to?
Mostly the region of like Constantinople and like the so the Eastern Roman Empire at the time, and it spread a little bit into like North Africa, and a little bit further into like Eastern Asia. But oh my god, in the infected areas, the death toll was really high.
Oh god.
In Constantinople during the peak of the epidemic, five thousand people.
Died every day.
I mean that happening in a modern city today would be unbelievable, Like I can't.
There are no words, No, there really are no there are no words. Five thousand people a day just dead.
There are a roughly forty four thousand students at this university, yeah total, So how many days would it take for everyone to die? If five thousand people die.
To day, that's too depressing.
Also its math nine days, Oh my god, just nine days. The population loss and resulting chaos caused by the plague of Justinian may have, and probably did, contribute to the downfall of the Roman Empire.
Those Like every disease we talked about so far.
This yeah, and this pandemic, oddly enough, seems to be more of a side note in history, attracting much less interest in the Black Death of the Middle Ages, despite having similar mortalities and far reaching impacts. But this is probably, or at least could be, due to the fact that there are fewer sources first.
Hand accounts for this time period.
All the same, this particular plague probably deserves an episode of its own.
But we just don't have the time, y'all.
Maybe someday, but not today.
No, today is reserved for one of the most, if not the most devastating pandemics of all time. I'm so excited, finally the moment we've all been waiting for, introducing the Black Death, a pandemic so devastating that to simply say it changed the course of history does not do it justice.
That was not planned.
I left that. Let's own it.
Yeah, the Black Death, which swept the Asian and European continents from thirteen forty seven to thirteen fifty and killed up to two hundred million people. Estimates range from around like seventy five to two hundred million people. That's what that's close to, like thirty percent of the global population at the time.
Thirty percent of the global population.
I mean estimates very Why but are you doing.
Some math right, I'm gonna try and figure out what is thirty percent of seven point five billion?
Oh god, yeah, let that sink in for a moment.
That's two point twenty five billion people today. Honestly, I can't even there's no way to wrap your head around that number. No, it's almost too much to even comprehend.
We can't articulate how we're feeling right now.
No, we don't have the words. This is my therapist's told.
Me, and so yeah, the effect of such annihilation is really the only word for it reverberated for centuries and is reflected in art, literature, language, and even.
The economic structure following the Black DEA.
That is so cool, I mean, like cool, maybe, isn't it. I get in trouble for using the word cool talking about things like this. That is so it's so fascinating, fascinating.
Yeah, we'll just yeah, we'll.
Stick with that one.
Before I get into all the nitty gritty of the Black Death, Let's get.
A sense of time and place.
When I read that a certain event took place in the Middle Ages or the Victorian Error or something, I have a hard time seeing what that time period looks like. So let's talk about it. What was the first half of the fourteenth century like in Europe?
I'm gonna guess dirty, mm hmm and not very pleasant.
I don't know that seems to be the case.
It is just my guess.
Let me just fill in some of those extra details. Well.
Steady population growth during the first couple of centuries before thirteen hundred led to a population of about seventy five million people in Europe. Wow, which is a lot fewer people than today, which is around four hundred million. Oh okay, but growth had stalled as resources became much more limited, and actually the population was hanging by a thread.
Really.
Yeah, starvation was a problem. Resources were tapped. Wow, the carrying capacity had been met.
Oh.
Just twenty or so years before the Black Death, periods of cooling climatological cooling had led to a lot of rain, very poor harvests, and famine was a result. Outbreaks of cattle disease such as anthrax and renderpest also contributed to famine. About ten to fifteen percent of the population died of starvation, and the rest of them were severely malnourished during this time prior to the Black Death.
I'm just really excited.
It was just one bad thing after another. Oh. Also, war and conflict was a near constant.
Oh yeah, you remember last week's episode about cholera and the description of filth ridden London in the eighteen hundreds.
That's what I'm guessing. It's like worse. Obviously no different.
In Paris, for example, several streets were named after after the French word for poop.
Mad you got it.
Butchers everywhere did their jobs an open view on the street and let the blood and guts of animals run freely.
One time I went to an event where they butchered a pig on stage. It was I don't know why I was at that event.
How have we never talked about this?
Very weird? We should talk about it off microphone.
Yeah, okay, we'll get back to that. Also, bathing was not a thing that people did.
Yeah.
No, when one person was I had to do some quotes here when one person was stripped down after being assassinated.
Yeah, just because that happened.
It explains why I guess his body was being written about or whatever.
It was said that.
Vermin quote boiled over like water in a simmering cauldron from his body.
We need to have like a not Safe or Breakfast on all of our future episodes.
Maybe we should release it like noon maybe not gonna happen.
Sorry, y'all, fair warning halfway through.
Yeah, and living in the country didn't keep you much safer. In fact, the rat to person ratio was much higher in rural areas.
The rat to person ratio. That's such a great Why don't we do anything in that ratio anything I think we do at Yeah, oh my god.
Rats were everywhere, living in every nook and cranny, every thatched roof, every barn. Keep in mind that a rat, a black rat or Norway rat can fit through a hole with the circumference of a human pointer finger.
Are you serious?
I read there's skulls and ribs are that tiny? Apparently, but I imagine are the limiting factors? What?
That's what I read.
They're so moldible because they're so chubby, like a rat is kind of like chubby and cute.
They can come up through your toilet.
Let's stop talking, yep.
Ooh god, So yeah, they were everywhere.
Wow.
Also, medieval medicine is not something I'd wish even on.
My worst enemy.
That's saying something.
Largely driven by superstition and religion. Doctors during this time were as clueless as their patients as to healthcare, but more dangerous since they held the illusion of knowledge and the power to wield it.
Did you like that?
That was so good? I love that? Beautifully written?
Thank you all.
In all, the setting for The Black Death was gray and dismal, with a population half starved and surrounded by rats and filth. In other words, it was perfect for a pandemic. Let's head to the European ground zero of this plague. Yes, the port city of Kafa, which is in modern Crimea. This is where I tell you to pull up a map unless you're driving. If you're driving, I'll try to help you out. Okay, everyone knows what Italy looks like. Find Italy, put your finger about halfway
through Italy, and then head east. Jump that first body of water to the land mass. Then you'll see a second body of water to the east.
Again. This slightly bigger.
Body of water is called the Black Sea. At the northeast corner of the Black Sea, there's some land that juts out. This is around where Kafa was located.
Ah, that was so useful. I am so bad at geography.
I mean we were educated in the United States.
Yeah, one time I did know all of the countries of the world, though, and where they were on a map in seventh grade. And then and then it made room for I know all the Backstreet Boys lyrics to every song worth it.
Dear. Okay.
Anyway. By thirteen forty seven, rumors of plague depopulating cities in China, India and Syria had been circulating.
Well, they weren't rumors.
Plague was actually on their doorstep. Outside of the city walls were Mongol ships leading laying siege to the city. Frustrated with their lack of success and probably sick of the smell, some of the Mongol army tossed plague ridden dead bodies over the walls in what may have been the first recorded act of bioterrorism.
That is awesome, Like, it's not awesome that it happened, but that is amazing that there are eight records of that, and be that we can trace like an actual plague outbreak to something like that. That is so incredible.
Well, it was probably too late for the residents of Kafa anyway. Oh, rats bearing plague infected fleas had already traveled down the ropes tying the ships to the harbor.
So they had already brought plague into the.
Their sneaky little rats.
Oh yeah, I mean, and they probably went under the the disguise of dark Oh. People began dropping like flies. The sight of so many dead and dying struck terror into many, including a group of traders from Genoa in Italy who hopped right onto a boat headed west. Unfortunately for the rest of Europe, they brought with them the plague. Over the course of the next three years, the plague would touch nearly every corner of the continent, convincing many
that the end of days had truly come. In Florence, where the author of our first hand account from earlier witnessed the plague, fifty percent of the population died, not just fifty percent of those infected, fifty of the entire population.
Holy God, mackerel wiped out. Oh my goes good Jesus, h.
You've seen Monty Python on the Holy Grail.
Right, bring out you dead, Yeah, bring out you dead.
That's waiting to say that that happened. That was real.
Oh my god. Yep.
People were actually punished for keeping dead bodies inside.
Okay, but also we learned that dead bodies can transmit plague, so maybe they should have been punished. Sure, you know what I mean.
Sure, I mean not.
Like the people who were taking them were probably protecting themselves as well as they should have been. But still, you can't harbor a plague ridden body.
There were laws to not keep dead bodies inside.
Lots of laws enacted from diseases as we've learned in this podcast so far.
Yeah, there was no time for rituals, no time for coffin building, no time for funerals, and even if there was time, there was no one to perform them.
The dead were laid out, quote.
Layer upon layer, just like one puts layers of cheese on lasagna.
Sorry, it was according to one chronicler from Florence.
Obviously they're from Italy first of all, and second of all, who puts layers of cheese on their lasagna? That's absurd?
Well, I mean I would expect that the recipe for lasagna may have changed over the last six hundred years or so, seven hundred.
That's a hilariously disgusting layers of bodies layered like lasagna.
Great, keep that image in your mind.
I've got it front the center.
Dirt was barely sprinkled over the bodies, and the stench of rotting flesh was in every molecule of air you breathed.
Crody.
The devastation spread from Italy west.
Of France, Spain, Germany, and then on to Great Britain, north to scan Avia and so on, killing anywhere from forty to eighty percent of the cities and villages.
It struck not just forty to eighty percent of those infected, forty to eighty percent of the entire village. Yeah, good gracious.
There were some villages that were entirely wiped out or at least knocked down to the point where people abandon the villages. And only recently have these old villages been found via like drone technology and looking at.
Oh my god, aurial aerial views.
Wow, that's amazing.
People seem to be struck down instantly by this disease. Healthy one minute, well, I mean healthy by medieval standards, and then dead twenty four hours later, coughing up blood and writhing in pain.
So I'm gonna guess they had pneumonic plague at that point, you know.
Well, many cases of the Black death were bubonic plague. Okay, but the horrifying descriptions of symptoms and the short interval between initial.
Infection and death suggests.
A high rate of pneumonic plague with a dash of septiscemic plague thrown in.
Of course, there's always a dash, a little bit here and there.
In fact, it has been suggested that the name black death refers to one of the symptoms of septiscemic plague, in which the extremities turn very black and hard. But actually, I'm just gonna be a little corrective here.
Let's push up our glasses a little bit and get your nerd on.
Here we go.
Actually, that name was used to describe the pandemic a couple of centuries after it happened. Oh.
Interesting, So it wasn't what it wasn't people who were seeing the symptoms who described it that way.
No, while it was happening, it was usually referred to in translation the Great Mortality or colloquially the Big Death.
So just everyone's dying guys.
Yeah, which we really speaks to the impact that it had. I mean, if you think about World War One was only called World War one after World War II started. Before it was just called the Great War, War to end all wars, that kind of thing.
So I think it's similar to that.
Well, of course, hopefully not during a war you're gonna call it. Here's the first of.
The many gosh, I mean nowadays, who knows anyway? In any case, the great numbers of dead struck fear and panic into all. No one knew what was the cause of the pestilence. While some thought they knew there was the usual one of God is smiting us for our wicked ways.
Gotta be God, gotta be gone.
Well, astrology was another contender. Cats were also blamed.
Maybe they had something to do with it, but it wasn't their fault.
Well, in many cities they were killed by the hundreds or thousands, which would have actually increased the rat population and thus plague incidents.
So it's like double sad because they were trying to help out, but then they all got infected by eating infected rats and then they all died, so then they couldn't do their job, and then the humans died. So the solution is we need more cats.
Never the solution, I'm gonna get roasted for that.
It wouldn't be for another five hundred years, actually half a millennium that the transmission cycle of plague from rat to flee to human.
Would be described.
Wow.
Yeah, So, as you can guess, there were many popular hypotheses as to what was causing the plague. The most damaging and widespread was that it was Jews.
Are you serious? Oh yeah, I did not know that.
At all, And sometimes Jews teaming up with leprosy victims.
Oh my god, humans are the worst.
The rumor was that there was a conspiracy in which Jewish people were poisoning the water supplies. Way to be a nasty cliche. Medieval European Christians, seriously gross extermination of entire Jewish populations in France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland.
The list goes on, literally, how have I ever heard about this? It's yeah, listeners, it's a big part.
Have you heard about this?
Because what the actual.
F never mind that the Jewish people were dying at the same rate as Christians. Oh, never mind that the confessions quote unquote of well poisoning by Jews were drawn out of people only after days of endless torture. The Christians wanted a scapegoat, and so they turned to their old favorite, claiming a widespread anti Christian conspiracy to mask
their age old racist hatred. Any excuse would do. Thousands of Jews were tortured or burned alive, mostly burned alive to stop the plague or, in some areas, prevent it from even appearing. Oh my god, so some were killed in advanceage.
That's disgusting.
Obviously the plague came for them anyway, and some felt despair rather than fear. An Irish monk wrote that he was quote waiting among the dead for death to come, and that sentence was to be the second to last in his manuscript. The final one was written by another monk. Quote and here it seems the author died.
It's a bummer.
Yeah, it's gonna be my dissertation.
And here it seems the author died.
Despair also came in the form of Flagelence fletch flatch which sounds are saying flatulence. You're talking about they were so sad because they were farting. No, I'm talking about flagelence. F l A g E l l A n t snce flatulence.
She just said flatulence, is what she just said. She did not say flagilence. She said flatulence.
Okay, okay, okay. Getting back to the despair part.
Flagelence were an radical a radical anti Semitic Christian group who believed that the only way to halt the plague was to atone with blood for their sins. Groups of fifty to five hundred would travel from village to village dressed in white cloaks with red crosses on them. Sound familiar, Yeah, it does. Whipping themselves with a stick which had at the end of it tales of knotted rope with bits of iron in the knots to draw out the blood.
So this is just like DaVinci code.
Yeah, I mean, Flagelens were not unique to the plague itself for the Black Death itself, but this was like a widespread movement, and part of it was that they didn't want or need priests or official leaders for this, and in many ways, the Black Death actually led to a shift in a more personal form of religion in which you did not have to go through a priest to commune with God. Interesting, and also because a lot of the priests and monks died.
So there's no more God communicators, so you just got to do it yourself.
You gotta do it yourself.
The Black Death impacted more than just religious practices, though. By the time it ended in thirteen fifty, around thirty to sixty percent of Europe's population had been wiped from the face of the earth.
Holy, oh, my God.
The Middle East lost about a third of their population as well.
Wow.
I could list shocking mortality rates for cities and countries, but the numbers would lose their impact because they're all so high.
That's the thing. It's too much for our brainens to even.
We can't absorb it.
No, the death toll was so huge, partially because of the high incidence of pneumonic plague, but also because the preceding famine had weakened the population substantially. There were also many who may have recovered if they received treatment, but there was no one to nurse them.
Yeah, and there was also no real treatment back then. It's not like the head antibiotics.
Well, even just bringing someone water, water, food, cleaning them, yeah, although they probably wouldn't have wanted to be cleaned. I The world that the great mortality left behind was fragmented, hopeless, baffled as to why they were spared when so many were not, and this was reflected in a popular art theme that arose after the pandemic called the Dance macabre.
Or a Dance of the dead.
In this allegory, death with a capital D goes to a ball and chooses his dance partners randomly without regard to age or class, just as the plague spared no group. In general, art became very realistic, if not fatalistic, with depressing depictions of death and suffering and did you know tapestries probably arose from Black death? No, why airflow should not be permitted, And so these giant tapestries covering windows and walls were made to ward off plague and.
Passion things get in. That's so interesting. Wow.
The plague also inspired many works of literature, including the De Cameron, which we've already talked about. Have you ever read The Mask of the Red Death by Poe.
No, but I feel like I need to.
Oh, you definitely need to.
It's a great short story and it may have been inspired by the De Cameron and the Black Death.
Also cool.
On the medicine front, there became a push towards more anatomical analysis of the stages of disease, more observational medicine, which was a good thing. Unfortunately, though, the failure of physicians to combat the plague in any way, and in some areas, physicians actually died at higher rates than their patients.
Oh that's not surprising because they were probably the ones in there getting all up in there and then getting pneumonic plague from patients.
Yeah, And so that that led to a complete lack of confidence in the field of medicine. It is often purported that English became the predominant language in England as a result of the Black Death. Really mm hmm, this is so cool. Before the plague, the French language dominated the cities in England among the educated and nobility, while the clergy mostly spoke Latin.
Huh.
The only people who spoke English were the country folk and the very poor in the city.
Interesting.
Both clergy and city dwellers experienced overall higher rates of death than their rural counterparts, and as a result, English took over.
Oh my god, so we could always speaking French. Yeah, potentially we could.
Plague also gave us the word quarantine, which comes from the Italian phrase for forty days. Ships and people arriving in the city of Ragusa, which is modern day Dubrovnik, Croatia.
I've been there.
Oh cool, were forced to undergo isolation for forty days in an attempt to halt plague. Unfortunately, rats were not quarantined, and plague spread anyway.
Ha ha, Okay, what else?
How about the logistics side of a sharp population decline? Before the plague, Europe was pretty much on the edge. The population had grown beyond what the land could support. The Black Death solved this, to put it frankly, ooh, and Europe didn't recover to its pre plague population levels for another one hundred and fifty years.
Wow.
Also after the plague, it was a laborer's market. The cost of goods and services skyrocketed, so much so that governments imposed wage limits so as to not let those pesky peasants reach the income level of the nobility.
Oh seriously, thank god, oh dear.
Still, though, this caused a shift in economic structure and an end to feudalism, where basically all of the classes lower than a lord were forced to work and live on a particular piece of land. Kind of like slavery hmm, just with.
More freedom, just a different name, essentially.
Some researchers suggest that the population drop led to a massive reforestation in Europe with so few people to work the land, and that could have contributed to the little ice age that the world was undergoing.
What. Yeah, so you're telling me that so many people died that the entire ecology of the environment shifted, which literally caused climatological change.
That's reported in some literature.
That has got to be like the first evidence of anthropological climate change. Yeah, And there you go.
Death.
Wow, that is so crazy.
I could go Honestly, I could go on and on about the impact of plague. Yeah, and I kind of have already, But I do want to cover a couple more things. The first is to briefly discuss the so called quote plague deniers, which are many, well maybe many is stretching it at this point. Several historians and biologists who believe that the Black Death was caused by something other than your cidea pestis, which is the agent that we recognize today as causing bubonic, mneumonic, and scept a
semic plague. Some have suggested a hypervrulent form of anthrax, a hemorrhagic virus, or a completely unknown disease that is now extinct.
Oh God.
They point to a few things to support their claim. One is the extreme speed with which the plague traveled across Europe and Asia. Modern outbreaks of plague took much longer to travel a similar distance. Another piece of evidence is the reported symptoms, high death toll, and quick onset of death, none of which were exactly replicated in modern epidemics or in the Third pandemic. However, DNA steps in and saves the day.
Love it when science rules.
Well, I mean, there's I would say fairly legit scientific claims Before before researchers went out and collected tooth pulp from plague victims buried in mass graves during the Black Death. They then tested this pulp for your sineopastus DNA, which they found.
That's so cool.
The Black Death and subsequent outbreaks were caused by the plague bacterium, the same one that causes plague today, well slightly different, it has evolved. The high mortality rate was probably due to its tendency to turn mnemonic, and also the poor, very poor health of victims.
To begin with.
Yeah, The next and final thing I want to do is dispel the notion that the pandemic we call the Black Death was the last one.
Not in the slightest.
The plague continued to simmer throughout Eurasia in the centuries following the fourteenth century pandemic, causing local epidemics here and there, which is not to suggest that they weren't devastating. The sixteen sixty five Great Plague of London killed seventy thousand residents out of a population of four hundred and fifty thousand.
Oh my god, about crazy.
Sixteen point six percent. That's a lot.
Of a lot of people.
And during that particular outbreak, many of the wealthy nobility fled the city since they had the means to do so, often bringing their doctors with them, and so no one was left to help the poor as they became infected and died by the thousands.
That's so sad.
It wasn't until the eighteen hundreds that the third pandemic began, and that is where our episode next week will pick up.
Yep, because we are so out of time.
Oh yeah, that's a lot of history right there.
It really was.
It had to be done, though.
Yes, the Black Death left such a monumental impact on the world in so many ways. Reading about it is slightly terrifying and ill.
Yeah.
I always get chills when I try to imagine that kind of devastation that a fifty or sixty or seventy percent mortality rate had on a city or the world.
Yeah, there's really not a good way to put it into words. Really, I mean, sixty percent mortality. That's of your one hundred friends, sixty of them dead. You've only got forty friends left.
It's really I mean even still, it's really hard to visualize.
It really is. It's too devastating.
Well, I hope you enjoyed learning about that.
I loved it.
I loved telling it.
It was really enjoyable, despite the fact that it's some of the most depressing things I've ever heard.
Well, if you want to read more, I have some suggestions for you.
Great, Okay.
The Great Mortality by John Kelly is a fantastic, exciting read all about the Black Death slash Great Mortality of the fourteenth century.
It is really well done.
It'll give you a really great view of what it was like, better than I could do, for sure. Justinian's Flee by William Rosen I didn't actually read, but it does cover the plague of Justinian cool in the Five Hundreds. Plagues and Peoples by William McNeil takes a nice broad view of the Black Death. Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World by Irwin Sherman I do not recommend. In the Wake of the Plague by Norman Canter.
It's terrible.
It's vaguely misogynistic, it's not well done, it doesn't give you a good overview. The title is extremely misleading with out the.
Side more than vaguely misogynistic based on your description of it to me.
The final one that I'll actually recommend is called Plague An Ancient Disease in the Twentieth Century by Charles greg and a couple of fiction books, I mean, there are many more out there, but a couple of them that tackle plague outbreaks. One is called Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, and this is a good one.
It's really interesting. So it's based on the true.
Story of a town in a village in England that willingly quarantined itself when it had an outbreak of plague within the village, interesting to prevent it from spreading to other populations in like the sixteen hundreds.
Huh, that sounds interesting.
And then a Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Dafoe who also wrote Robinson Crusoe. He was a kid during the sixteen sixty five London plague, but he wrote a book based off of it.
Cool, awesome. I don't have as many books to recommend, but I did read the longest paper of all time that might as well be a book. It was called Rcinia pestis idiologic agent of Plague by Perry and Featherston, published in Clinical Microbiology Reviews in nineteen ninety seven. It's kind of an old paper, but it's a really interesting overview of plague. So I don't know how many of you are that into reading deep microbiology papers, but it
was cool. But also, in case you didn't know, dear listeners, we have a good Reads list called These Books Will Kill You, right, Yes, that's right, so you should definitely if you're on good Reads check it out. If you're not on good Reads, I don't know, get on Goodreads. It's great, Aaron converted me.
You can still access it.
Right, You can still see the list regardless, but that'll have all the books that we've ever recommended on that list, so you don't have to like frantically scribble them down as we're reading them. And as always, thanks for listening.
Thank you so much for listening.
Thank you to Bloodmobile for the music. And I feel the need to point out today since today is a day of self identification.
Bloodmobile is my younger brother Daniel. Thanks Dan, Thanks Dan. We love the music, we really do.
And also some of the tracks were done by Dan and his friend Ian.
Thanks Ian. As always, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, check us out on all of the social medias, and thanks for listening. Yeah, thanks so much, and tune in next week when we talk all about what is happening with plague today. Wash your hands, yes, filthy animals,