plague

Plague (Yersinia pestis), also known as pestilence, is an actual disease, an actual bacterial germ. Because the word is often used to mean any pandemic disease, it is sometimes called the bubonic plague. It became known as the plague because it was the common one in the English-speaking world before the rise of modern medicine in the 1800s and its love of naming things.

From the 500s to the 1800s it repeatedly wracked Eurasia.

For example:

• 540s: The Plague of Justinian, 25m-100m dead.
• 1331-53: The Black Death, 75m-200m dead.
• 1665: The Plague of 1665 in London, 100,000 dead.
• 1890s: China, India and port cities like Cape Town, San Francisco, Rio, etc.

It had more or less vanished from Europe by 1800. No one is sure why. It might have to do with the replacement of black rats by brown rats.

The plague gave us:

• those creepy masks (pictured above).
• quarantines, the invention of Italian city governments, keeping infected goods and people in lockdown for a period of days (originally 40) to slow the spread of the disease.
• those post-apocalyptic scenes of empty cities. They come from science fiction films, which got it in turn, directly or indirectly, from H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” (1898), who in turn seems to have got it from Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year” (1722) – the two books are too much alike – which in turn is based on eyewitness accounts of the Plague of 1665. That plague emptied the streets of London – through death, quarantine and people fleeing the city.

Not the bubonic plague:

• The plagues in the Bible may or may not have been bubonic. We do not know enough about them.
• The plague of Athens, that hit the city in -430 after the first year of the Peloponnesian War. According to the account of Thucydides, it sounds most like a viral haemorrhagic fever, like Ebola, though some argue it was typhus or typhoid fever.

Origins: It first appeared in written records at a mouth of the Nile in Pelusium, Egypt in 541, spreading round the Mediterranean in two years, arriving in Britain in 664 along with Western civilization. According to one genetic study, the present-day strains of the plague seem to go back 2,600 years ago to China.

The black rat (Rattus rattus) helped to spread the Black Death. Via Vebi Export.

Transmission: Mainly by way of fleas fleeing dead rats, gerbils, marmots or other rodents. Nomads, like Arabs, Turks and Mongols, helped to spread it across Eurasia – but it was big cities, with their countless rats, that were hit hardest. Many blamed not rats and their fleas but the gods and their wrath.

Signs and symptoms: Flu-like symptoms. Later buboes appear on the neck, armpits, groin and thighs. They are swellings filled with pus. They can turn black and become painful. Thus all the shrieking.

Cure: antibiotics. At least a 30% chance of death in a matter of days otherwise.

Frank To dressed as a plague doctor while promoting his exhibition, “The Human Condition,” in Edinburgh, Scotland. Via HowStuffWorks. (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Where are they now: Plague is still out there. As of 2015 it was most common in Peru, D.R. Congo and Madagascar, killing maybe 100 people a year worldwide.

– Abagond, 2020.

Sources: mainly Google Images, the WHO, “A Journal of the Plague Year” (1722) by Daniel Defoe; “Plague: A Very Short Introduction” (2012) by Paul Slack.

See also:

• germs, the last 13,000 years
• pandemic
  • swine flu
  • Ebola
  • HIV/AIDS
  • covid-19
• Reading Thucydides
• Genghis Khan
• A Guide to Turks

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