The Black Plague

And here I was, wondering what I was going to come up with for a topic for this Friday’s blog, when Yahoo News gave me my inspiration: a story about a girl in Colorado who survived the bubonic plague.  Yes, the same plague which wiped out millions in Europe in the Middle Ages.  It’s also known as the Black Death or Black Plague.

 Spread.  According to the story, it came on ships from China (the disease itself originating in Yunnan Province) in the early fouteenth century and quickly spread through Europe, even England.  Oddly, Poland was spared.  Rats & fleas were the means by which the disease initially spread, then from human to human.  To the extent that a secular, scientific or biological cause was considered (as opposed to some “scourge from God”), the diagnosis was “bad air”, but how that related to rats, fleas, and humans was nowhere close to understood.  Science was in its infancy and the Ptolemaic solar system – the Earth at the center, with the Sun yet another “planet” – still reigned.  The Renaissance was centuries down the road.

 Symptoms.  The main symptoms were high fever, delirium, vomiting blood, and “buboes” (large, nasty bulges) in the groin and armpits.  There was no known cure, though almost everything – including drinking urine – was attempted.  Death was all but certain within 2-7 days.  The disease spread rapidly; efforts at quarantine started in Dubrovnik in 1377.   In addition to the bubonic plague, there is also pneumonic plague and septicemic plague as well, which have far higher mortality rates than the bubonic variety.  However, such a high rate also limits the ability of the plague to spread, as it kills the victims before they can spread the disease to others. 

 1349.  The peak in Europe was 1349, although subsequent outbreaks occurred into the 19^th century, and continue even today on very limited occasions (e.g. the isolated case of the girl in Colorado recently). 

 Dance of Death.  Pictures from the period show victims dancing until they died, or dancing with skeletons – somewhat macabre.  With no cure and no escape, the plague drove many to insanity.  The “flagellants” whipped themselves in remorse to atone for whatever grievous sins much have brought this heinous scourge upon them.  Others went to the other extreme, wallowing in depravity and promiscuousness as the end was near. 

            Aldous Huxley, in The Doors of Perception, had a further theory.  He argued that the idiosyncrasies of the deficient medieval diet encouraged madness and hallucination.  Possible ergot fungus poisoning, and the delirium caused by high fevers, no doubt also fueled the fires of insanity among these poor lost souls. 

            I wrote earlier about nightmares and delirium.  How much worse must it have been for these people.  Even without the plague, their life expectancy was 30+.  Their church hammered them about Satan and Hell constantly.  They had terrible doctors who couldn’t cure anything.  Now this horrible disease struck them and they had nowhere to go.  The worst possible nightmare, come to life.  Hell on earth – no wonder those Bosch and Brueghel paintings were so weird.

 Plague Doctors.  As if the plague itself wasn’t weird enough, leave it to the medieval mind to make it even stranger: the “plague doctor”, who claimed to specialize in curing the disease (difficult without suitable hygiene or antibiotics) wore long frock coats, a wide brimmed hat, and a long-beaked bird mask.

 “The Seventh Seal”.  The 1957 black & white film with Max von Sydow (still making movies, by the way!) as a Crusader returning to Sweden and finding it in the throes of the Black Death.  The typical fixation people have with this film is the knight (MvS) playing chess with “Death”, but I find the madness of the locals faced with imminent death from the Plague to be a more compelling element of the film.  I also found it intriguing that Death either cannot or will not tell the Knight what form, if any, the afterlife will take.

 Prevention vs. Cure.   Because the plague is caused by bacteria, really the cure is antibiotics, which are a fairly recent invention, e.g. penicillin.  However, since the plague is spread by rats and fleas, the general improvement in personal and urban hygiene tended to reduce the occurrence of the disease.   Typically modern outbreaks tended to coincide with breakdowns in hygiene.  Theoretically an antibiotic-resistant strain could mutate and give us 1349 all over again, but this is thankfully very unlikely.