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: HDT WHAT? INDEX 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-the- state 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 2 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX 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 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX 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 4 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX 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 non- white 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 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX BUBONIC PLAGUE THE BLACK DEATH wall and onto the lanes and rooftops of this port on the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea.1 GERM WARFARE 6 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX 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 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX 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).