Background Reading

In October 1347, Italian ships on the Black Sea en route to and from China dock in Messina, Sicily -- their crews are dead or dying. Whatever is killing them quickly spreads ashore. Within a month, it passes through Sicily and moves back out over water. By January 1348, it has penetrated France via Marseille and North Africa via Tunis, and by July 1348, it spreads through France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Eastern Hungary, and Southern England. This is all the more amazing given that at this time it took a person one to three months to travel from London to Rome. The plague died out in the winters and was resurrected in the springs. At the end of 1349, it had spread throughout the British Isles and Scandinavia and continued to move east.

The death toll was massive -- the "official" figure is one-third of Europe dead between 1348 and 1351, when it temporarily abated, but keep in mind that in some towns the death toll was 90 percent -- in others 10 percent. Further, the poor and anyone else living in close quarters (monks, for instance) died at a higher rate. Many monasteries were completely wiped out, but the death rates among the nobility and the nobility of the church were very low. Understandably, people wanted to know why this was happening to them. Here are the four prominent hypotheses of the day:

The claim of academics and physicians: The plague was the result of a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars on March 20, 1345.

The Roman Catholic Church's claim: God's wrath -- it was a punishment for the people's sins.

The claim of the mayors and town-controlling nobles: Poor sanitation. Dumping waste in the streets leads to sickness (a revolutionary claim at the time -- no one actually knew this to be true).

The claim of the masses (i.e., everyone else): The Jews are poisoning the wells.

Here is the "evidence" used by each group, respectively, to support its claim:

Medicine at the time was based on astrology and astronomy. Most physical sickness was attributed to poor alignment of the stars. The conjunction had happened, and it was a rare celestial event. Other events had been tied to celestial causes. Many were waiting to see what the triple conjunction would cause, and when the Black Plague occurred, they felt that they had found out.

The Church said, "Look around." Plunder, looting, rape, prostitution, war, and drinking were everywhere. God's wrath had shown itself in destructive ways before -- the people of Noah's time were hit with a flood, and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.

The sanitation workers were among the first to die, and other diseases were suspected to be related to poor sanitation.

Christians tortured "confessions" out of Jews. The Jews were believed to be "jealous" of the Christians (because, it was thought, the Jews knew "in their hearts" that they were damned). The lepers had been blamed for poisoning the wells and causing the typhus outbreak in 1320 (after the Black Plague, it was believed that the Jews set them up to it).

Here are some problems people at the time saw with the evidence:

Nobody but the academics and physicians believed their explanation!

If God's wrath already has descended, there's no reason to change one's behavior. The attitude was roughly, "If we're already doomed, why alter our behavior?"

Later sanitation workers appeared to be immune (unknown to the people, they'd been exposed and had developed a resistance). If it really was poor sanitation, why weren't they still dying? In fact, this immunity among sanitation workers caused many people to think the sanitation workers had magical powers. People followed them on their street-cleaning routes, trying to absorb some of the immunity. Others, more desperate, actually applied waste to themselves, thinking that it would keep the disease away.

So many Jews died too (Why would any community poison itself?). The other problem is that the plague was present in areas where no Jews lived.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Street Sweepers?

The “reasonable” suggestions put forth by the Church, early physicians, and the subjugation of the Jewish community are all quite plausible, considering the context of the era in which the epidemic took place. Considering that the widespread beliefs of the day were that people were meek and were worshipping a powerful and vengeful deity, that “doctors” of the day relied on the alignment of planets rather than treating patients empirically and the notion of deliberate homicidal sabotage of the water supply perpetrated by Jews, all of this would have been common, everyday thinking for the epoch being discussed. It is not irrational or beyond logic to assume that people of that period would have arrived at the aforementioned conclusions.

Because the masses operated under the given assumptions, it seems obvious that logical fallacies are evident in the hypotheses of the mayors and town leaders. The community stewards came to what today would be viewed as a fair assessment of the situation. But, the societal norms of the day caused many people to discount their comments as inaccurate or nonsensical.

There are holes in the story of the sanitation workers as presented in the material. Yes; dumping waste into heavily utilized streets in small villages and towns could be attributed to causing a plethora of debilitating and fatal illnesses, like meningitis. Today, however, peer-reviewed scientific research widely accepts that the Black Plague was spread by flea and rodent bites, not by wading through sewage and/or other forms of waste. Perhaps, because of the proximity to food scraps and animal waste, it is reasonable to conclude that these workers would have come into contact with rats and fleas daily; which could explain why sanitation workers were reportedly the first to die. But, that would be a contradiction to an earlier point made in the reading that indicates that ships were arriving into port with their crews “dead or dying.”

Also, a recent special on PBS thoroughly investigated this topic. The show was called “Secrets of the Dead: Mystery of the Black Death.” Modern science has thoroughly vetted the question of “immunity” or any other perceived “resistance” to the Black Plague. This new research indicates that a genetic predisposition would have excluded some people from contracting the bacterial infection. This evidence repudiates any claim of disease-resistance that would have been unique to a community of sanitation workers (in any time period) and opens up the possibility that people from all walks of life would have a protective DNA wall to prevent an infection.

For information about the PBS Special, visit this website:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/previous_seasons/case_plague/index.html

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3 comments:

  1. NYorkFebruary 21, 2009 at 4:59 PM

    You are right, though of all the claims, this one seems like the most plausible story-at first. However, while poor sanitation does contribute to poor health conditions, it being the cause of the plague was wrong. If this claim were true, why did the plague die out in winter months? I think, like most of the people of the day, the mayor and town officials were just trying to assess the cause of a great dangerous unknown.

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  2. KristenFebruary 21, 2009 at 8:27 PM

    This is such an interesting and logical perspective. It is so interesting that you think the scholarly people would know about what is going on in their community in regards to the physical world. It's so funny that so many people were infected and it took until modern times to figure out that the plague was spread by rodents. One would think that would not be hard to figure out. Also, it's so interesting that the plague died down in the winter, when the rodents stayed in more and don't move around much from house to house.

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  3. DMilsteinFebruary 26, 2009 at 10:03 PM

    Good Aaron - did you have a look at recent outbreaks of Bubonic plague, I believe in New Mexico and Nevada? How did the myths and chaos surrounding the medieval plagues compare to our reactions to the appearance of AIDS? I remember the hysteria and radical accusations that were made when AIDS arose as our society's "epidemic."

    I see you mentioned Luther in an earlier comment - I wanted to add to yours by reminding our class that Luther did not intend to cause a schism in the Church; in fact, he later expressed regret that his call for revision in Church policy led to the collapse of Catholicism.

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