The Black Plague occurred during the budding of modern culture, where world trade, large cities, and large agricultural farms are just starting. The black plague came over from East Asia due to the increased interaction between Europe and Asia through war and trade. It was able to stay and prosper in Europe for centuries due to crowded cities which provided multiple hosts, and a lack of sanitation where waste disposal was an issue. The Black Plague likely rose up in Asia from a zoonotic disease. Because of the increased human interaction with domesticated animals, the zoonotic disease was able to transfer over to humans and infect them.

Once the Black Plague made it into Europe, there wasn’t much helping citizens from becoming infected since germ theory wasn’t around yet and what was around was about balance of the four elements of the body and miasmas. Because of the lack of understanding of the disease, medical treatment didn’t do anything to help and sometimes would just make it even worse. So, without being able to go to doctors or science, many turned to religion for help or an explanation. Many also turned away from religion, mostly the catholic church and sought their own answers, either by establishing their own private church or by becoming a flagellate. Flagellates during the black plague probably made it a lot worse as they did many of the things we know not to do during an epidemic because it could spread the disease. They would travel from town to town and interact with the people, sometimes having sex while there. They would also whip themselves and cause self-harm which was bad because the plague could be spread through blood contact. Not only were the flagellates possible carriers of the plague, their radical and extreme antics caused widespread panic throughout Europe making the people lash out and lynch and burn Jews, which they blamed to be the cause of the plague.

The most interesting part for me about the Black Plague is what happens in the aftermath. For the lower class, although they were hit the hardest by the plague, they benefited greatly from the aftermath because the population was so low that they had a deficit of manual labor, making their living wages increase and they were able to buy their own land and food was much more plentiful because there was less mouths to feed. For the upper class however, while they weren’t heavily impacted because they could move away from plague infected areas and seal themselves away, after the plague they lost their cheap labor force to run the castles and farms. Some nobles even had to work their own land to survive because the old workers could afford to move away.  This also meant that there was in increase in war and fighting as the nobles were trying to maintain their power.

The knowledge of germ theory today makes a widespread plague a lot harder to occur unless its hard to detect or has a high drug resistance. Even though we have basically the perfect set up for a pandemic to occur with fast global transport and a high population density, the understanding of what germs are and how they are spread means that we have a lot of safe guards in place to try and stop pandemics from occurring. We also have Vaccines for many of the diseases that are around today such as small pox, polio, mumps, and measles. In developed countries where most of the population has these vaccines the country has heard immunity where there aren’t enough viable hosts for a disease to survive and spread. However in undeveloped countries with poor healthcare is where we still see epidemics occurring such as the bubonic plague still in Madagascar or Polio surviving in India, the Middle East, and parts of Africa. A lot of this has just as much to do with education in these areas as poor healthcare. In Madagascar where the bubonic plague is still occurring you have people interacting with the dead and stealing their infected bodies to talk to. You also have eating of animals (bush meat) which have died from the plague or natural causes and then they get it from that. And they also have a lot of people living in basically a junk yard that is full of trash and dead bodies with very low hygiene practices.