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Plague: Yesterday and Today – Artifact 2

Historical Aspects:

By some accounts, the Black Death has claimed more lives than World War one and two combined. That represents a number that is very nearly incomprehensible. As rational human beings, we want to know why. Why was the bubonic plague so incredibly deadly at that stage in history? What could we have done better?

Yersinia pestis, the black death, bubonic plague, all names for the same thing. The important thing to understand is that the plague was a wildfire. It was no different at it’s core than any other ‘fire’, but the forest allowed it to become something different altogether. That forest was humanity. We had just really figured out this whole sailing thing and we were branching out across the European and Indo-Chinese continents. This gave the plague mobility. The poor and the foolish lived close together with each other in the squalor of the slums nearby the hundreds of thousands of rats that inundated the towns and ships. The rats gave the plague a carrier. And the poor gave the plague a host.

The societal response to the outbreak of plague was exactly what one would expect from rational human beings. Everyone lost their collective tits. The rich blamed the poor and moved to their country homes. The poor blamed god, but he couldn’t be reached, so they blamed the jews. Others went full religious fervor, engaging in self-flagellation and crazy rites. The infected were sometimes ‘quarantined’, but that really only meant that they were sent to the slums to die. The medieval years were not ones famed for their learned scholars, and so the ignorant died.

The overall effects of the bubonic plague are hard to pin down. The obvious tertiary effects of the massive drop in population included more land, less workers, higher pay, more job availability etc. If you were a survivor in the years following the plague,  you essentially had it made in the shade. Despite the Pope declaring that the Jews could not logically be blamed, they were still persecuted and many moved to other countries that favored them. The rich survived in much greater numbers than the poor because they all fled big cities. The church was seen as unhelpful at best during the plague, and many members of congregations disavowed themselves of the feckless church and turned to other forms of worship or none at all.

Plague Today:

In the United States today, most people are infected with plague when they are bitten by a flea that is infected. People can also infect themselves through contact with infected tissues or fluids from an animal that is sick with, or has died from, plague. Instances of plague are closely monitored by the CDC and treatment for infected persons is swift as well as their isolation and quarantine of anyone they’ve been near. Luckily, the incubation period for plague is only a couple of days up to 6.

Plague has reemerged in the modern limelight in one place in particular. Madagascar. As you can see in the map below, the tiny landmass has one of the highest occurrences of plague in the world.

The socioeconomic situation in Madagascar is very similar to that of the medieval peoples. The poor are living close together in their own waste and garbage and rats run rampant. It is the perfect breeding ground for plague.

Lukas Snear • 02/25/2017


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