The Black Death of the Middle Ages

The Black Death of the Middle Ages has long held a mythic place in history as a story of a terrible pestilence visited upon Europe, a pestilence that perhaps could return one day. Yet, in the modern age we have been able to control most infectious diseases, eliminating the unsanitary conditions that produce them in the industrialized nations and attacking them with wonder drugs in areas still afflicted with such problems. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Black Death decimated Europe and caused massive economic and social damage to the nations of Europe.

The organism that causes bubonic plague is well known today. The plague is caused by a bacillus called Yersinia pestis that is transmitted by the flea. Plague is primarily a disease of rodents, and epidemics with human begins begin with contact with the fleas of infected rodents. The two primary forms of the disease in the human being are the bubonic plague, the most common form in the Middle Ages, and which is characterized by the swelling of the lymph nodes, and pneumonic plague, with the extensive involvement of the lungs. Plague is spread from rodents to human beings in crowded urban areas. In the fourteenth century, the disease was known as the Black Death, and some plague infections were bubonic and some were pneumonic. It has been estimated that in various parts of Europe between two-thirds and three-fourths of the population was killed in the first pestilence, and one-quarter of the population of

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he remainder of the fourteenth century and through all of the fifteenth century. The population of Europe did not begin to recover until the end of the fifteenth century, and it would not be until the middle of the sixteenth century that Europe would begin to regain the level of population it had enjoyed in the thirteenth century. Episodes of the plague still did not europe end until the beginning of the eighteenth century when a new species of brown rat started replacing the black rat (Duiker and Spielvogel 489-490). Giovanni Boccaccio provided an account of the plague in Italy in the fourteenth century, writing about the time when the plague reached Florence and suggesting possible explanations in astrology of the wrath of God for human sins. He also notes how the plague continued in spite of human efforts to stop it, efforts . . . such as keeping the city clear from filth, the exclusion of all suspected person, and the publication of copious instructions for the preservation of health. . . (Boccaccio 246). Medical knowledge had no cure for the disease, and no one really understood what caused it except that it could be spread not only by touching the person who had it but also by touching their clothes or anything they h

Category: History - T