By: Tess Lampe
“All the citizens did little except to carry dead bodies to be buried [...] At every church they dug deep pits down to the water-table; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shovelled it down on top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth, just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese.” This is exactly what those living in Europe from 1346 - 1353 often saw or experienced with the disease known as the Black Death. This specific excerpt came from a chronicle (letter) written by a person in Florence, Italy.
The person who wrote this chronicle was trying to relate to another, a Renaissance poet by the name of Petrarch, describing their experiences and what he knew people saw often living in Italy. The words of Petrarch tells how he thought that nobody else would believe the terror that became reality to himself and the people around him, “O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.” Another chronicler by the name of Agnolo di Tura from Tuscany, Italy related by saying, “... in many places in Siena [Italy] great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of death [...] And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city.”
The Black Death (bubonic plague) ended up killing about 50 million people, which was approximately 60% of Europe’s entire population at the time. From the years 2010 - 2015, there were hundreds to thousands of reports of plague. However, the Black Death is something that we know the effect of from history with these statistics. With that information, many scientists and authorities in China have become worried of a possible repetition of history - another outbreak of the plague. The bubonic plague has been found in the third person in the past week from around Beijing. Even though the disease remains very rare, that is what is causing people to panic. The original cases were two people from Mongolia who were diagnosed with pneumonic plague, which is caused by the same bacterium as the bubonic plague. The third person, identified as a 55-year-old man, was also diagnosed with the bubonic plague in the same area as the previous patients - Beijing. Authorities said that the man caught the disease by “eating wild rabbit meat.”
During the time of the Black Plague in the mid 1300s, over half of the people living in Florence and Siena died. It quickly became an epidemic (a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time; outbreak) of the bubonic plague. When researched scientifically, is was found that the plague is a disease caused by a bacterium known as Yersinia Pestis. This bacteria is often around areas where many large rodents live called a “plague focus.” Whenever a black rat (house rat) comes into contact with a human’s habitat (their house most likely), that person has a high risk of becoming infected because the rodent is carrying a disease dangerously close to the human. Whenever rats have this disease for a certain amount of time, the fleas on them start to bite humans, causing the humans a large bubo or swelling on their lymph nodes, hence the name “bubonic plague.” In eighty percent of cases of the plague, the patients die due to the disease making them ill quickly, taking the person about 23 days to die.
Despite the heavy worry and panic caused by the supposed return of the Black Death plague, the people who were diagnosed with it and all of those whom they have interacted with have been quarantined and treated. Scientists from all over the world, mainly China, are hoping that yet another outbreak is able to be stopped before it could potentially do horrible damage like it did in Europe all of those centuries ago.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1206331/black-plague-news-china-bubonic-plague-latest-cases-plague-outbreak-map
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/black-death-greatest-catastrophe-ever
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1203947/plague-news-China-pneumonic-plague-cases-plague-symptoms-black-death
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