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Bubonic Plague

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THE BLACK DEATH, OR BUBONIC PLAGUE

“I know histhry isn’t thrue, Hinnissy, because it ain’t like what I see ivry day in Halsted Street. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that’ll show me th’ people fightin’, gettin’ dhrunk, makin’ love, gettin’ married, owin’ th’ grocery man an’ bein’ without hard coal, I’ll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befur.”
— Dunne, Finley Peter,

OBSERVATIONS BY MR. DOOLEY,

New York, 1902
An infectious virus, according to Peter Medewar, is a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news. This is what the virus carried by the female Culicidae Aëdes aegypti mosquito, causing what was known as black vomit,

the American plague, yellow jacket, bronze John, dock fever, stranger’s fever (now standardized as the “yellow fever”) actually looks like, Disney-colorized for your entertainment:

And this is what the infectious virus causing Rubeola, the incredibly deadly and devastating German measles, looks like, likewise Disney-colorized for your entertainment:

Most infectious viruses have fewer than 10 genes, although the virus that caused the small pox was the biggie exception, having from 200 to 400 genes:

WHAT?

  • BUBONIC PLAGUE
  • THE BLACK DEATH

Then, of course, there is the influenza, which exists in various forms as different sorts of this virus mutate and migrate from time to time from other species into humans — beginning with an “A” variety that made the leap from wild ducks to domesticated ducks circa 2500 BCE.

(And then there is our little friend the coma bacillus Vibrio cholerae, that occasionally makes its way from our privies into our water supplies and causes us to come down with the “Asiatic cholera.”)

On the other hand, the scarlet fever, also referred to as Scarlatina, is an infection caused not by a virus but by one or another of the hemoglobin-liberating bacteria, typically Streptococcus pyogenes. What did the insightful Herman Melville and little ward-of-thestate Laura Bridgman have in common? —their eyes had been damaged by scarlet fever.

TB, referred to in the 19th Century by such terms as phthisis, is an infection caused by the bacillus

Mycobacterium tuberculosis which contains 4,411,529

coded aminos in the about 4,000 genes of its genome. A common error nowadays is to presume that tuberculosis affected only the lungs. It did not then and it does not now. It can settle in just about any part of the body, causing abscesses and crippling the bones and causing atrophy of the musculature. Humans can contract a human form of tuberculosis or a bovine form. One of the challenges of the 19th Century was to put a number of apparently quite different ailments together, and come to recognize that they were in fact not different diseases, but various forms taken by TB.

COMPARING 19TH-CENTURY WITH 21ST-CENTURY TERMINOLOGY:

Lung Sickness, Consumption = tuberculosis Galloping Consumption = pulmonary tuberculosis Phthisis Pulmonalis = wasting away of a body part

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Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith

WHAT?

  • THE BLACK DEATH
  • BUBONIC PLAGUE

Pott’s Disease = tuberculosis of the spinal vertebrae

Scrofula = tuberculosis of lymph nodes or glands of neck Bubonic plague is caused by the bacillus Yersina pestis is an infection which is transmitted from rats to humans

by the rat flea Xenopsylla cheopsis.

Malaria is a relapsing infection characterized by chills and fever, caused by various protozoa of the genus Plasmodium introduced into the bloodstream of reptiles, of birds, and of mammals such as humankind by

the Culicidae Anopheles mosquito.

(HINT: If you ever want to “go there,” click on one of these icons. Fear not, these are mere virtual viruses.)

According to Jared Diamond, native American populations were more affected by the germs of the European intrusives simply because they had had lesser contact with the domesticated species and their diseases:

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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WHAT?

  • BUBONIC PLAGUE
  • THE BLACK DEATH

“The major killers of humanity throughout our recent

history –small pox, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera– are infectious

diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.... [They] evolved out of diseases of Eurasian herd animals that became domesticated. Whereas many such animals existed in Eurasia, only five animals of any sort became domesticated in the Americas [due to the] ... paucity of wild starting material.”
— Jared Diamond, GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL:

THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES

(NY: W.W. Norton, 1997, pages 196ff

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Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith

WHAT?

  • THE BLACK DEATH
  • BUBONIC PLAGUE

14TH CENTURY

1346

General Jeffery Amherst’s proposal of the use of the small pox virus in bio-warfare in America against nonwhite populations in 1763 is far from the 1st reported employment of such a tactic of warfare. For instance, in this year 1346, invaders “from the East,” presumably Tartars, are reported to have attempted to spread not only terror but also the Black Death by catapulting the bodies of their bubonic plague victims over the Caffa city

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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WHAT?

  • BUBONIC PLAGUE
  • THE BLACK DEATH

1

wall and onto the lanes and rooftops of this port on the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea.

GERM WARFARE

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Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith

WHAT?

  • THE BLACK DEATH
  • BUBONIC PLAGUE

1347

A licence to crenellate (refortify) at Saffron Walden was granted to Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Essex. However the castle he would erect would fall to ruin so that in 1765 Richard Gough would note “a great deal of it has been carried away to mend the roads.” (The lower part of the surviving flint rubble walls had originally been submerged within an earth mound, so standing inside the castle keep today you’re actually standing in what had been the basement, used mainly for storage. Although it had not been a dungeon, there may have been a small cell for prisoners in the base of the “fore-building” on the corner of the castle nearest the museum.)

According to tradition, upon the inspiration of a naval bombardment of Calais that happened to coincide with

1. It has been of great interest to me that, in the cross-pollination of the New World and the Old World which occurred in the 16th Century, the normally inflexible statistical laws of epidemiology did not obtain. That is to say, one would have expected in accordance with the well-understood parameters of epidemiology that where the human populations were denser, and subject to greater rates of mixing, that is to say, in the national states of Europe, we should have seen a greater rate of mortality, and where the human populations were unquestionably, considerably less dense, and the barriers to mixing much greater, that is to say, in tribal North and Central America, we should have seen a lesser rate of mortality, while in fact precisely the opposite seems to have obtained. (This, to me, raises the specter that the recorded instance of General Jeffery Amherst’s proposal for germ warfare against the native populations was not unique, and not a precedent, but is simply the first case on current record of a long-standing tradition of European warfare against indigenous populations. And I am reminded here that it was Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s early experience of warfare against African indigenes which persuaded him as to the merits of germ warfare, upon which during WWII he became so insistent that the USA actually set up a germ bomb factory for him outside Terre Haute, Indiana. Try finding out about this germ bomb factory of WWII vintage by writing off to your government under the Freedom of Information Act, if you have no better way to waste your time — that manufacturing plant was managed for the US government by the local chapter of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan and some of my Long uncles and great-uncles worked in it. My point here is that we are commonly able to grasp that “instances of record” is merely a subset of “instances,” except that in the case of outrageous accusations such as the accusation that white people commit genocide against non-white people there is considered to be no plausibility to the suspicion that there are likely to have been instances which were not placed upon the record.)

The received explanation for this curious history, as found in Jared Diamond’s GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES (NY: W.W. Norton, 1997, pages 196-7), is:

“The major killers of humanity throughout our recent

history –small pox, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera– are infectious

diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.... [They] evolved out of diseases of Eurasian herd animals that became domesticated. Whereas many such animals existed in Eurasia, only five animals of any sort became domesticated in the Americas [due to the] ... paucity of wild starting material.”
— Jared Diamond, GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL:

THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES

(NY: W.W. Norton, 1997, pages 196ff

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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WHAT?

  • BUBONIC PLAGUE
  • THE BLACK DEATH

a thunderstorm, at this point Saint Barbara became the patron saint of English gunners (that’s curious, because Barbara had originated as a pagan fairy-queen rather than as one of the Christian martyrs, and because she had previously been doing service as the patron saint of miners).

From this point into the Year of our Lord 1352, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague, species name Y e rsinia pestis, would be attacking the scavenger white blood cells of the immune systems of Europeans. In areas of Europe in which a third of the human population would be dying sudden but agonizing deaths during this spasm that came to be referred to as the Black Death (75,000,000 souls), there is now a population derived largely from the survivors of this episode, many members of which possess a genetic mutation which is currently protecting them to a considerable degree against infection by the AIDS virus. Be it noted, both the bacterium causing the bubonic plague, and the virus causing AIDS, make their attacks upon the scavenger white blood cells of our immune system. Whatever this gene complex is, that is possessed by these fortunate Europeans, it definitely is helping protect against such attacks.

The period of the Black Death and the Wars of the Roses would lead to a decline in fruit cultivation in England, but this decline would then be reversed under the reign of King Henry VIII.

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Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith

WHAT?

  • THE BLACK DEATH
  • BUBONIC PLAGUE

1349

Jews were expelled from Hungary.

ANTISEMITISM

After the Black Death had killed one out of every three Europeans, European governments started instituting increasingly draconian laws designed to force laborers to stay at home rather than moving about in search of better pay or working conditions.

In this year first Thomas Bradwardine became Archbishop of Canterbury, and then Simon Islip. There is a preserved graffitum in the church at Ashwell in Hertfordshire, that reads

Primula pestis in M ter CCC fuit L minus uno,

which being translated means “The first plague of the 1300s was in the year ’50 minus one.” (Actually, the outbreak of bubonic plague had already begun in London in 1348.)

Barbara Tuchman reports in THE DISTANT MIRROR (page 99) that:

In Paris, where the plague lasted through 1349, the reported death rate was 800 a day, in Pisa 500, in Vienna 500 to 600 [a day]. The total dead in Paris numbered 50,000 or half the population. Florence, weakened by the famine of 1347, lost three to four fifths of its citizens, Venice two thirds, Hamburg and Bremen, though smaller in size, about the same proportion. Cities, as centers of transportation, were more likely to be affected than villages, although once a village was infected,

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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WHAT?

  • BUBONIC PLAGUE
  • THE BLACK DEATH

its death rate was equally high. At Givry, a prosperous village in Burgundy of 1,200 to 1,500 people, the parish register records 615 deaths in the space of fourteen weeks, compared to an average of thirty deaths a year in the previous decade. In three villages of Cambridgeshire, manorial records show a death rate of 47 percent, 57 percent, and in one case 70 percent. …

Economically, the century would fare badly (page 125):

When death slowed production, goods became scarce and prices soared. In France the price of wheat increased fourfold by 1350. At the same time a shortage of labor brought [the unthinkable], a concerted demand for higher wages.... Within a year after the plague had passed through northern France, the textile workers of St. Omer near Amiens had gained three successive wage increases. In many guilds artisans struck for higher pay and shorter hours. In an age when social conditions were regarded as fixed, such action was revolutionary.

The plague would scourge the 14th Century through six outbreaks in six decades. As society disintegrated (pages 171-175 passim):

… the Free Companies who “write sorrow on the bosom of the earth” … were to become the torment of the age. Composed of English, Welsh, and Gascons released after [the Battle of] Poitiers by the Black Prince, … they had acquired in the Prince’s campaigns a taste for the ease and riches of plunder. Along with German mercenaries and Hanault adventurers, they gathered in groups of twenty to fifty around a captain and moved northward … they swelled, merged, organized, spread, and operated with ever more license. … Led by professional captains, the companies, sometimes numbering 2,000 to 3,000, [burned, tortured, killed, and looted the countryside]. For defense against the companies, villages made forts of their stone churches, surrounding them with trenches, manning the bell towers with sentinels, and piling up stones to throw down upon the attackers. … Peasant families who could not reach the church spent nights with their livestock on islands in the Loire or in boats anchored in midriver. In Picardy they took refuge in underground tunnels enlarged from caves dug at the time of the Norman invasions. With a well in the center and air holes above, the tunnels could shelter twenty or thirty people with space around the walls for cattle.

(page 129): Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man. Meantime it left apprehension, tension, and gloom. It accelerated the commutation

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Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith

WHAT?

  • THE BLACK DEATH
  • BUBONIC PLAGUE

of labor services on the land and in so doing unfastened old ties. It deepened antagonism between rich and poor and raised the level of human hostility. An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust. In creating a climate for pessimism, the Black Death was the equivalent of the First World War, although it took fifty years for the psychological effects to develop. These were the fifty-odd years of the youth and adult of Enguerrand de Coucy [the noble whose life Tuchman uses to chronicle the century].

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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WHAT?

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  • Unit 731 and the Japanese Biological Warfare Effort

    Unit 731 and the Japanese Biological Warfare Effort

    Unit 731 and the Japanese Biological Warfare Effort Unit 731, its subunits and facilities were coordinated by the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory in Tōkyō. UNIT 731 (Manshū Dai 731 Butai / 満洲第七三一部隊) Led by Ishii Shiro, the Water Supply and Purification Unit HQ was designated Unit 731 in August, 1941. Located in the Beiyinhe area of Harbin, Manchuria and later moved to Pingfan. According to an anonymous Youth Corps member T-San “…the name of the unit was not 731 – it was 731-T. That’s because it was a secret unit.” (Gold page 191) The code number later changed to 25202. UNIT 100 Located in Hsinking, Manchuria (present day Changchun). Was headed by a veterinarian, Dr. Wakamatsu Yujiro. UNIT 200 731 subunit located in Manchuria. No other details. UNIT 516 In April, 1942, joined Unit 731 on the outskirts of Hailar near the Soviet border for tests. UNIT 543 Branch of Unit 731 in Hailar. Located in old Russian barracks in front of station. SAKAE 1644 (Tama Unit) Under the China Expeditionary Army. Officially the Central China Water 榮 Supply and Purification Department. Located in Nanking. KŌ 1855 Under the North China Area Army. Water Supply and Purification Department located 甲 in Peiping. Had branch in Chinan that was a combination prison and experimentation center. NAMI 8604 The South China Water Supply and Purification Department under 23 Army. 波 Established in 1938, at the Chungshan Medical University, Canton. Staffed by several hundred personnel. OKA 9420 Established in February 1942 at the former Raffles Medical University in Singapore. 岡 Staffed by 1,000 people and led by Major General Kitagawa Masataka.
  • Accounting for Silence/ Inheritance, Debt, and the Moral Economy of Legal Redress in China and Japan

    Accounting for Silence/ Inheritance, Debt, and the Moral Economy of Legal Redress in China and Japan

    YUKIKO KOGA Hunter College—City University of New York Accounting for silence: Inheritance, debt, and the moral economy of legal redress in China and Japan ABSTRACT nfourlandmarkrulingsonApril27,2007,theSupremeCourtof Legal efforts seeking official apology and Japan rejected compensation claims filed by Chinese survivors of compensation for Japanese colonial violence have, wartime forced labor, who were all male and were abducted from since the 1990s, become a prime site of Chinese and China to work in Japan, and by the so-called “comfort women” Japanese attempts to come to terms with the past. (ianfu), who were forced into wartime sexual slavery by the Japanese This ethnography explores what it means to legally ImperialI Army.1 Despite its firm rejection, the court acknowledged in un- account for Japanese imperialism decades after the precedented, strong language the violence and injustice committed by the original violence ended with Japan’s defeat in World Japanese government and corporations during the war. The court gave War II. Examination of recent compensation lawsuits “voice” to unclaimed experiences after decades of silence by underscor- filed by Chinese war victims against the Japanese ing the moral and monetary debts that Japanese society owes to Chinese government and corporations shows how legal war victims. These Supreme Court decisions signaled the opening of a new interventions publicly reveal artificially separated, chapter in the series of compensation lawsuits filed since the 1990s by Chi- yet deeply intertwined moral and monetary nese war victims.2 The rulings explicitly recognized that, nearly 70 years economies that present postwar compensation as a after the original violence ended with the Japanese defeat in 1945, the past question of the generational transfer of has not been adequately accounted for.