Gerbils not rats caused bubonic plague

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

It is worth pointing out that in the 14th century, it was not called the black death--that's one of those very frequent cases of an historian somewhere at sometime coming up with a "sexy" name for an event, which then becomes popular. In England, it was known as the , a reasonably descriptive name. The other nations of Europe all used a similar name.

Great Mortality was one of the names in German as well, "Großes Sterben". The other was "große Pestilenz" (great epidemic) [Today's German name still is "Pest", from the Latin pestis = epidemic.]

"Black" was used first by Danish and Swedish writers writers in the 16th century - not as a colour but to describe the dark experiences of the 1347 pandemia.

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

That makes sense about the use of the term "black." I'have never claimed to an historian, and if i were, it would not be a medical historian. I have no opinion on the cause of the mortality--but from the point of view of social history, the great mortality is the operative term. The number of deaths in such a short period of time worked a profound change on Europe. I have read some historians who purport that it lead to the birth and growth of the wage economy. I think there is a lot to recommend that point of view.

1 Reply

@farmerman,

You're a snide son of a bitch. There's no challenge involved Mr. Nasty, because i didn't offer an opinion, just information. I'm not surprised at your shoot-the-messenger attitude. You are the one who can't stand contradiction, and the one with the anger management problem. My original post in this thread had nothing to do with you.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Feel better?

0 Replies

@Setanta,

This is one of the measures which failed to stop the migration of labor, which now commanded greater wages, in the wake of the great mortality. The source is Wikipedia, which is increasingly an unreliable source, but given your better skills at web searches, Walter, i'm sure you can find this and many other examples.

Statute of Labourers 1351

0 Replies

I'm reading along, not any kind of historian, although I was an odd teen and read medical history for a while when I was in the throes of wanting to be a doctor. My memory is not so much failing now as that it always was, in that I end up with impressions, not data. Although, once in a while I actually do remember data, but don't get scared about that.

Just saying I'm enjoying the conversation.
Will add as a by the way, that back when I was a bacteriology major in the early sixties, it was Pasteurella pestis. Ah, so many bacti names have changed since then, as did latin plant names that I learned in the eighties. Aggravatin'.

Re plague - I remember a Pasteurella sylvatica. What happened with the squirrels?

1 Reply

@ossobuco,

I think Pateurell pestis was the original name and is still an alternate nomenclature. Don't know why

2 Replies

@farmerman,

Maybe something to do with Louis. Or, more likely, that it was a the name for quite a while (I don't know the span of it).

0 Replies

@farmerman,

Quote:

what he wrote about the forms of Plague wed doubt (butter n honey wraps on the bubos)

I dont doubt the honey...modern findings have honey behaving as an anti-Septic and an ANTI-BIOTIC if it is the original honey and has not been boiled or treated as is the honey in the store.

0 Replies

One story that keeps circling in my mind is a village in England where the plague showed up via a traveling cloth salesman. People survived who remember he put his hand into his samples and pulled back from a sharp insect bite that draw blood immediately. It has been used to bolster the idea that it was all done by fleas. I cant find any other instance of a flea drawing blood from such a sharp deep bite. This makes me suspect another insect was also involved. Oh and it definitely wasn't a larger creature like a rat. The village is of great interest because they sealed off the village voluntarily to save the lives of others. This means the plague can be followed almost door to door.

1 Reply

@farmerman,

Yersinia pestis were discovered by Yersin in 1894. He originally named them after Pasteur Pasteurella pestis.

1 Reply

@Ionus,

Towns, villages quite often "sealed" off their place in fear of the bubonic plague pandemic. Well is Basel, where they sealed of the town, burnt the Jews, and got the black death days/weeks afterwards. (The so-called "Basel pogrom)

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

This English town is notable because they had the plague and voluntarily sealed it off to save the outside world. They locked themselves up with a killer.

1 Reply

@Ionus,

Well, really notable are Ragusa and Marseille, where such started in 1377 resp. 1383. (And the term "quarantine" derives from that - quaranta giorni = 40 days).

When you got a Pestbrief (a document, proving that you were free of that disease), you didn't only get an ID-card (those pestbriefe are forerunners of the later passports) but it was a quite valuable item.

2 Replies

@Walter Hinteler,

Its a pleasure learning from you Walt.

0 Replies

@Walter Hinteler,

A German "pestbrief" from the 17th century (the museum in my native town has some older ones)

0 Replies

@Walter Hinteler,

looked up Yersin's bio. Thanks for the explanation.

0 Replies

The biggest omission in this study about the propagation of the plague is the condition of humans in those years.

Too much fuss about "evolution" of bacteria and viruses -which by the way never happened- when the key is a mixture of a climate change and the weakness of humans in the transition.

It is a fact that human's health is challenged every Winter and this is the season when people acquire diseases, and when seasonal diseases spread out faster. Winter season is known as the time of catching a cold, the flu, and where these spread out when people sneeze and by touch.

How far Winter season affects the different kind of bacteria a and viruses is an important task in order to find out the Black Death.

So far, humans were weak under a small ice age which happened in the 14th century and in the centuries that followed it.

It is important to compare that temperature had influence with the propagation of this disease in those years.

Then, it was not a more powerful or "evolved" bacteria -which is nothing but mere fantasies after all- but a weakened human what caused a faster propagation of the disease.

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/WestTech/x14thc.htm

Quote:

Two great natural disasters struck Europe in the 14th Century. One was climatic: the Little Ice Age. This term is used in wildly varied ways by different authors, and there actually seem to have been two cooling episodes: an earlier one from the late 1200's to 1600 or so, and a later one in the 1700's and 1800's. During the earlier one, the Baltic Sea froze over in 1303, 1306 and 1307, something never before recorded. Alpine glaciers advanced. The Norse settlements in Greenland were cut off and grain cultivation ceased in Iceland. The last ship sailed from Iceland to Greenland in the early 1400's (tantalizingly close to Columbus); when contact was resumed in the 1700's, the settlements were long abandoned. Starvation, disease, raids by English pirates and conflict with natives have all been suggested as causes, and all probably played a role in the demise of the colonies. In France, crops failed after heavy rains in 1315; there were widespread famine, reports of cannibalism, and epidemics.

Carlos Le Baron.

3 Replies

@carloslebaron,

In Europe, there have been several plague epidemics between the 6th and 8th century (from 541 until about 770), between 1347 and 1353, in the 15th century, in the 17th century ... in the 19th century, in the 20th century ...

0 Replies

@carloslebaron,

Quote:

Too much fuss about "evolution" of bacteria and viruses -which by the way never happened

...And you know this how?

You should call the Max Planck institute and make your best argument for "Non evolution of bacteria'.
I'm sure they'd invite you to the next symposium re population genetics and etymology of disease.

Quote:

So far, humans were weak under a small ice age which happened in the 14th century and in the centuries that followed it

Most diseases are opportunistic (and blindly so, the bacteri hve innate biochemistry to merely survive nd they occupy any available niches. The fact that DNA randomly evolves both genomically and epigenetically and the organism evolves responding to selection of the subspecies is fairly well understood .

I wish I could be so damn certain about things

1 Reply

Gerbils not rats caused bubonic plague

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know