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black death The Tragedy of the Black Death Imagine yourself alone on a street corner, coughing up bloody mucous each time you exhale. You are gasping for a full
Black Death Historically the Black Death, also referred to as the Bubonic plague, is disputably recognized as the most devastating disease to affect the human race.
The Black Death The Black Death The Black Death, possibly the worst disaster ever to hit Europe, was a series of three different plagues that killed one-third to
The black death The Tragedy of the Black Death Imagine yourself alone on a street corner, coughing up bloody mucous each time you exhale. You are gasping for a full
the black death The Black Death The Black Death is one of the most lethal disease out breaks in history. The Black Death's widespread terror accounted for nearly
Submitted by bmw1414 on November 1, 2006
Category: History Other
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The Black Death
The Black Death, possibly the worst disaster ever to hit Europe, was a series of three different plagues that killed one-third to one-half of the population of the continent from 1347 to 1351 (Cohen, 1974). Plague was once the general term given any widespread disease that caused a large number of deaths; what was once called a plague is now called an epidemic. A pandemic is an epidemic that covers a vast area. The Black Death was a pandemic of the disease that medieval man called the Plague. The Plague was an infectious fever caused by the Pasteurella pestis bacilli (The Black Death: Was it caused by rats or viruses?, 2001). This disease, commonly referred to as the bubonic plague today, is primarily a disease of wild rodents, most commonly the black rat (Cohen, 1974).
The black rat's home was originally in China, but during the Christian era, it slowly began to spread throughout Europe. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the black rat was replaced in many areas by its larger and stronger relative, the brown or Norway rat. But in the fourteenth century the black rat had not yet disappeared. Cities, towns, and the countrysides of Europe were infested by these plague-bearing rodents. The plague killed rats more rapidly than it killed men. Reports of large numbers of deaths of rats had long been associated with historical plagues (Halliday, 1965).
However, the bacillus doesn't pass directly from rat to rat, or even from rat to man. Instead, there is an intermediary-the rat flea-that sucks the blood of infected rats and picks up the plague (Cohen, 1974). The flea then transmits some of the bacilli when it sucks the blood of a new host, such as a man (Chase, 2001). Unfortunately for men, while the rat flea prefers the blood of rats, it will suck the blood of other warm-blooded animals, including men, if no other rats are available. When plague breaks out among rats, large numbers of them die,...
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