The Plague: The Black Death

Apparently originating near Delhi in the 1330s, the plague spread to southern Asia by 1346 and to the cities of Kaffa and probably Constantinople by the end of the following year. Merchants traveling from Kaffa and probably from Constantinople effectively transmitted the plague to the ports of Genoa and Venice in northern Italy, to Messina in Sicily, and to Marseilles in southern France. The pandemic spread through Spain and France in 1348, arriving in England in the autumn of that year and eventually reaching Scandinavia and northern central Europe in 1349. Northern Russia first suffered its effects in 1352, after the plague had declined in Western Europe. China experienced the disease between 1352 and 1369; Iceland and Cyprus were totally

The biological spread of the plague bacillus (Yersinia pestis) was facilitated when engorged, bacilli-infested fleas would leave their original animal hosts in search of new hosts, usually humans. The bite of the flea produced oval swellings called buboes. These chestnut-sized lumps appeared commonly near an area of lymph nodes, usually in the groin, the armpit, or the neck. The blackened color of these buboes gave the disease its common name—the Black Death. It appears that three types of plague existed. The first was the simple bubonic plague. The second and the most common type was pneumonic plague, which occurred when the bacillus invaded the lungs or was transmitted through exposure to a coughing plague victim. The third type was the always fatal septicemic plague, which occurred when the bacillus fully invaded the bloodstream and overwhelmed the nervous system before producing

Believing that strong odors could prevent transmission of the disease, some people would bathe daily in urine and even drank urine; others smeared human excrement on their clothing. Attempts were made to bottle flatulation; others allowed male goats to live in their houses, filling rooms with the malodorous smell of their urine. It was also the practice for people to hover over open latrines and inhale the stench. One witness reported “many were so courageous that they swallowed the pus from the mature boils in spoonfuls.” Boils were incised, dried, and powdered for inhalation or administered orally in a drink. Geoffrey Chaucer’ The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) describes such psychological and behavioral responses to the