{"title":"The archaeology of \"plague\".","authors":"Daniel Antoine","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":74144,"journal":{"name":"Medical history. Supplement","volume":" ","pages":"101-14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632866/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"27520005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2008-01-01DOI: 10.1017/S0025727300072100
S. Cohn
Open any textbook on infectious diseases and its chapter on plague will describe three pandemics of bubonic plague. The first, the plague of Justinian, erupted in the Egyptian port city of Pelusium in the summer of ad 541 and quickly spread, devastating cities and countryside in and around Constantinople, Syria, Anatolia, Greece, Italy, Gaul, Iberia, and North Africa: “none of the lands bordering the Mediterranean escaped it”, and it reached as far east as Persia and as far north as Ireland in less than two years and spread through their hinterlands.1 Historians have counted eighteen waves of this plague through Europe and the Near East that endured until ad 750, if not longer.2 The second pandemic originated in India, China, or the steppes of Russia, touched the shores of western Europe (Messina) in the autumn of 1347, circumnavigated most of continental Europe in less than three years and eventually struck places as remote as Greenland. While the first lasted just over two centuries and the third a mere twenty-five years in pandemic form, this second wave returned periodically for nearly five hundred years in western Europe. Its last attack in Italy was at Noja (Noicattaro), near Bari, in 1815,3 but it persisted longer in eastern Europe and Russia. Its cycles, however, lengthened from a hit about every ten years for any locale during the latter half of the fourteenth century to absences of 120 years or more for major cities at least in Italy by the seventeenth century. Despite repeated claims in textbooks, the plague of Marseilles in 1720–1 was not this pandemic's European finale.4 In 1743, 48,000 perished from plague in Messina; in 1770–1 over 100,000 in Moscow; and in the Balkans, Egypt, Asia Minor and Russia this Black-Death-type of contagious plague may have persisted as late as 1879.5
{"title":"Epidemiology of the Black Death and successive waves of plague.","authors":"S. Cohn","doi":"10.1017/S0025727300072100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300072100","url":null,"abstract":"Open any textbook on infectious diseases and its chapter on plague will describe three pandemics of bubonic plague. The first, the plague of Justinian, erupted in the Egyptian port city of Pelusium in the summer of ad 541 and quickly spread, devastating cities and countryside in and around Constantinople, Syria, Anatolia, Greece, Italy, Gaul, Iberia, and North Africa: “none of the lands bordering the Mediterranean escaped it”, and it reached as far east as Persia and as far north as Ireland in less than two years and spread through their hinterlands.1 Historians have counted eighteen waves of this plague through Europe and the Near East that endured until ad 750, if not longer.2 The second pandemic originated in India, China, or the steppes of Russia, touched the shores of western Europe (Messina) in the autumn of 1347, circumnavigated most of continental Europe in less than three years and eventually struck places as remote as Greenland. While the first lasted just over two centuries and the third a mere twenty-five years in pandemic form, this second wave returned periodically for nearly five hundred years in western Europe. Its last attack in Italy was at Noja (Noicattaro), near Bari, in 1815,3 but it persisted longer in eastern Europe and Russia. Its cycles, however, lengthened from a hit about every ten years for any locale during the latter half of the fourteenth century to absences of 120 years or more for major cities at least in Italy by the seventeenth century. Despite repeated claims in textbooks, the plague of Marseilles in 1720–1 was not this pandemic's European finale.4 In 1743, 48,000 perished from plague in Messina; in 1770–1 over 100,000 in Moscow; and in the Balkans, Egypt, Asia Minor and Russia this Black-Death-type of contagious plague may have persisted as late as 1879.5","PeriodicalId":74144,"journal":{"name":"Medical history. Supplement","volume":"27 1","pages":"74-100"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0025727300072100","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57088950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Universal and particular: the language of plague, 1348-1500.","authors":"Ann G Carmichael","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":74144,"journal":{"name":"Medical history. Supplement","volume":" ","pages":"17-52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2630032/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"27520002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Medieval and modern bubonic plague: some clinical continuities.","authors":"Lars Walløe","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":74144,"journal":{"name":"Medical history. Supplement","volume":" ","pages":"59-73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632865/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"27520004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2008-01-01DOI: 10.1017/S0025727300072082
Kay Peter Jankrift
“In the year of our Lord 1350 the greatest mortality of mankind, called the epidemia, ruled in the world so that the number of living men was insufficient to bury the others,” noted the chronicler Florence of Wevelinghoven in the middle of the fourteenth century.1 An eyewitness of the Black Death, he later became bishop of Munster in Westphalia (1364–78) and bishop of Utrecht (1378–93).2 The Westphalian cleric was only one among many to describe in these or in very similar words the unimaginable mortality caused by the Black Death. Contemporary records from all over Europe tell the same story: the disease appeared everywhere in the world and depopulated the cities, leaving too few survivors to bury the countless dead.3 It is this image of a “worldwide” pandemic of the Black Death, together with, to a lesser extent, descriptions of the subsequent outbreaks of plague by contemporaries, which has dominated the historian's view of medieval epidemics until today. But what one may call the language of plague, the language of the sources, comprises universal and particular aspects at the same time. As European society is not uniform (despite all attempts of the administration of the European Union) and has never been so in the past, one has to ask how far did the different geographical and cultural backgrounds of chroniclers and medical practitioners influence the language of plague? Are there any differences in the attitudes towards the disease and in the ways of dealing with medieval epidemics, even if the same words are used? Did an Italian really have exactly the same view of plague as a Spaniard, an Englishman or a German? What finally inspired me to ask these questions within the context of plague were several examples of such differences in sources of the period concerning another medical problem, the disease (or rather the diseases) contemporaries used to identify as leprosy.
14世纪中叶，编年史家佛罗伦斯(Florence of Wevelinghoven)写道:“在公元1350年，人类死亡率最高的瘟疫，称为流行病，统治了世界，以至于活着的人的数量不足以埋葬其他人。作为黑死病的目击者，他后来成为威斯特伐利亚明斯特主教(1364-78)和乌得勒支主教(1378-93)威斯特伐利亚牧师只是众多用这些或非常相似的语言描述黑死病造成的难以想象的死亡率的人之一。来自欧洲各地的当代记录讲述了同样的故事:这种疾病出现在世界各地，城市人口减少，幸存者太少，无法埋葬无数的死者正是这种黑死病“世界范围”大流行的形象，以及在较小程度上同时代人对随后鼠疫爆发的描述，主导了历史学家对中世纪流行病的看法，直到今天。但我们所说的鼠疫语言，源头语言，同时包含了普遍和特殊的方面。由于欧洲社会并不统一(尽管欧盟的行政当局做出了种种努力)，而且过去从未如此，人们不得不问，编年史家和医疗从业者的不同地理和文化背景对鼠疫语言的影响有多大?对这种疾病的态度和处理中世纪流行病的方式有什么不同吗，即使使用相同的词汇?意大利人对瘟疫的看法真的和西班牙人、英国人或德国人完全一样吗?最终促使我在鼠疫的背景下提出这些问题的，是关于另一个医学问题的几个例子，即当时被称为麻风病的疾病(或者更确切地说是疾病)。
{"title":"2 The Language of Plague and its Regional Perspectives: The Case of Medieval Germany","authors":"Kay Peter Jankrift","doi":"10.1017/S0025727300072082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300072082","url":null,"abstract":"“In the year of our Lord 1350 the greatest mortality of mankind, called the epidemia, ruled in the world so that the number of living men was insufficient to bury the others,” noted the chronicler Florence of Wevelinghoven in the middle of the fourteenth century.1 An eyewitness of the Black Death, he later became bishop of Munster in Westphalia (1364–78) and bishop of Utrecht (1378–93).2 The Westphalian cleric was only one among many to describe in these or in very similar words the unimaginable mortality caused by the Black Death. Contemporary records from all over Europe tell the same story: the disease appeared everywhere in the world and depopulated the cities, leaving too few survivors to bury the countless dead.3 It is this image of a “worldwide” pandemic of the Black Death, together with, to a lesser extent, descriptions of the subsequent outbreaks of plague by contemporaries, which has dominated the historian's view of medieval epidemics until today. But what one may call the language of plague, the language of the sources, comprises universal and particular aspects at the same time. As European society is not uniform (despite all attempts of the administration of the European Union) and has never been so in the past, one has to ask how far did the different geographical and cultural backgrounds of chroniclers and medical practitioners influence the language of plague? Are there any differences in the attitudes towards the disease and in the ways of dealing with medieval epidemics, even if the same words are used? Did an Italian really have exactly the same view of plague as a Spaniard, an Englishman or a German? What finally inspired me to ask these questions within the context of plague were several examples of such differences in sources of the period concerning another medical problem, the disease (or rather the diseases) contemporaries used to identify as leprosy.","PeriodicalId":74144,"journal":{"name":"Medical history. Supplement","volume":"1 1","pages":"53 - 58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0025727300072082","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57088529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2008-01-01DOI: 10.1017/S0025727300072070
A. Carmichael
What disease or diseases caused the recurrent, demographically punishing epidemics that Europeans called plague? During the last twenty years a once prevalent historical consensus about causes and consequences of European plagues has dissolved, prompting new archival research as well as novel technological and interdisciplinary approaches to material evidence. The core debates about the history of plague are not, however, limited to scholars of medieval and early modern Europe. Molecular biologists over the last decade have determined that the organism that causes plague today, Yersinia pestis, is a relatively recent emergent pathogen descended from a significantly less lethal gastro-intestinal parasite, Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. Furthermore, fifty years ago microbiologists accepted a model of three different “biovars”—biochemically different variants—of Yersinia pestis, which were tidily aligned to three historical pandemic waves: antiqua, mediaevalis, and orientalis. That synthesis, too, is seriously challenged. There are instead at least eight Yersinia pestis strains and four biovars, and all have emerged within the last 5000 to 20,000 years.1 This organism remains a likely perpetrator of the great plagues in Europe because all Yersinia pestis biovars can be extraordinarily lethal in human bodies. Most medievalists, including those who doubt that the Black Death and subsequent plagues could have been caused by Yersinia pestis, make a modern assumption that the Black Death indeed had some unique microbial cause. No one yet has argued in a sustained fashion that the plague was a “perfect storm” of many different epidemic infectious diseases, but one could.2 Nor has a radical scepticism emerged—for example, that the causes of each and every local or regional epidemic called peste/pestilentia by contemporaries need to be investigated separately, unrelated to other local contexts—but that, too, might be possible. If we would be truly rigorous, we cannot assume that a “plague” in one place was due to the same specific microbial cause as a pestilence in another locality, even during this worst of all recorded pandemics. There needs to be evidence for such a claim. During the High Middle Ages Europe was thickly settled, but profoundly rural; great cities were exceptional, and regional markets were not well integrated.3 In the early modern centuries, market centres were far better connected: a significant epidemiological difference. Scholars, nevertheless, analyse individually later medieval and early modern pestilences, accepting local differences and local historical contexts. Nor do most maintain that, given one location, all the sizeable pestilences over these later centuries were necessarily due to the same cause. Historians simply do not accept that “plague” (peste) had or has one universal translation applicable over both time and space—except when we consider the Black Death. In other words, some of the doubts expressed in recent years
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Pub Date : 2008-01-01DOI: 10.1017/S0025727300072094
L. Walløe
In his book The Black Death transformed,1 Samuel K Cohn claims that the epidemic disease described in western European historical sources from ad 1347 to the mid-seventeenth century under the names plague, pestis, pestilence, plagen and the like must have been a disease other than the modern plague that reached Hong Kong in May 1894 from other parts of China, and later spread first to India and then to all inhabited continents. Alexandre Yersin showed that the disease in Hong Kong was caused by a bacterium, later named Yersinia pestis. It was also Yersin who claimed that he had found not only the cause of plague in China, but also the cause of the medieval and early modern plague epidemics. Four years after the discovery of the bacillus, Paul-Louis Simond proposed the transmission route from the rat (Rattus rattus) via the flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) to humans, although the scientific community was not fully convinced until ten years later, since this hypothesis did not explain all observations. The problems with the hypothesis were forgotten, which is easy to understand when we remember that the doctors and epidemiologists who were working in India at that time were facing a worsening and very serious epidemic. The simple preventive message to public health workers and the public was: exterminate the rats. The identification of medieval plague as the same disease as modern plague was accepted within thirty years, first by medical scientists and later by historians. Cohn writes, “Without argument, historians and scientists have taken the epidemiology of the modern plague and imposed it on the past, ignoring, denying, even changing contemporary testimony, both narrative and quantitative, when it conflicts with notions of how modern bubonic plague should behave.”2 I agree to some extent with Cohn's criticism of how historians have imposed a modern understanding of plague epidemics in India on historical epidemics, and especially how historians have invented large populations of rats in the medieval towns and countryside of northern Europe without any support from contemporary historical sources or archaeology.3 However, I strongly disagree with his main point, which is that the medieval and modern plague epidemics must have involved different diseases in medical and bacteriological terms. Thus, I argue that Yersinia pestis is the cause of both medieval bubonic plague and modern bubonic plague, and that the symptoms, signs, pathology and pathophysiology are very similar. On the other hand, the two series may have differed in speed of transmission, population mortality and some other epidemiological characteristics because of differences in climate, housing conditions, the availability and population density of flea species and other possible insect vectors, and the availability of susceptible mammals other than rats. Cohn's main arguments are as follows: There is a lack of evidence of involvement of rats and fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis) in late-
在他的书《黑死病的转变》中，1 Samuel K Cohn声称，从公元1347年到17世纪中叶，在西欧历史资料中被描述为鼠疫，鼠疫，瘟疫，plagen和类似的流行病必须是一种疾病，而不是1894年5月从中国其他地区传到香港的现代瘟疫，后来首先传播到印度，然后传播到所有有人居住的大陆。亚历山大·耶尔辛指出，香港的鼠疫是由一种细菌引起的，后来被命名为鼠疫耶尔森氏菌。也是耶尔辛声称他不仅发现了中国鼠疫的原因，而且还发现了中世纪和近代早期鼠疫流行的原因。在发现这种芽孢杆菌四年后，保罗-路易斯·西蒙德提出了从老鼠(Rattus Rattus)通过跳蚤(Xenopsylla cheopis)传播给人类的途径，尽管科学界直到十年后才完全相信，因为这个假设并不能解释所有的观察结果。这个假设的问题被遗忘了，当我们记得当时在印度工作的医生和流行病学家面临着日益恶化和非常严重的流行病时，这就很容易理解了。给公共卫生工作者和公众的简单预防信息是:消灭老鼠。中世纪鼠疫与现代鼠疫是同一种疾病，这一观点在30年内被医学科学家和历史学家接受。Cohn写道:“毫无疑问，历史学家和科学家们将现代鼠疫的流行病学强加于过去，忽视、否认甚至改变当代的证词，无论是叙述上的还是数量上的，当这些证词与现代黑死病应该如何表现的观念相冲突时。在某种程度上，我同意科恩的批评，他认为历史学家把对印度鼠疫流行的现代理解强加于历史上的流行病，尤其是历史学家在没有任何当代历史资料或考古学支持的情况下，虚构了北欧中世纪城镇和乡村的大量老鼠然而，我强烈不同意他的主要观点，即中世纪和现代的鼠疫流行在医学和细菌学方面一定涉及不同的疾病。因此，我认为鼠疫耶尔森菌是中世纪黑死病和现代黑死病的病因，它们的症状、体征、病理和病理生理学都非常相似。另一方面，由于气候、住房条件、蚤类和其他可能的昆虫媒介的可得性和种群密度以及鼠以外易感哺乳动物的可得性不同，这两个系列可能在传播速度、种群死亡率和其他一些流行病学特征方面存在差异。Cohn的主要论点如下:缺乏证据表明老鼠和跳蚤(Xenopsylla cheopis)参与了中世纪晚期/现代早期的瘟疫。传播的速度是不同的(中世纪是快的，现代是慢的)。死亡率以及受害者的年龄和性别分布是不同的(例如，中世纪欧洲死亡率高，现代印度死亡率低)。获得性免疫是不同的(中世纪的持久免疫，现代的没有持久免疫)。体征和症状是不同的(例如，在中世纪瘟疫中，疮主要在颈部和腋窝，而在现代瘟疫中，疮在腹股沟)。科恩还声称当Yersin和他的当代医生确定鼠疫在香港与中世纪晚期和近代早期瘟疫流行,最近没有医学知识对鼠疫提供给欧洲医生,医学信息追溯到去年早些时候在伦敦在16654年或瘟疫流行流行,尽管一般都知道,1722年在马赛有瘟疫流行,在1743年在莫斯科在梅西纳和1771 - 2。
{"title":"3 Medieval and Modern Bubonic Plague: Some Clinical Continuities","authors":"L. Walløe","doi":"10.1017/S0025727300072094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300072094","url":null,"abstract":"In his book The Black Death transformed,1 Samuel K Cohn claims that the epidemic disease described in western European historical sources from ad 1347 to the mid-seventeenth century under the names plague, pestis, pestilence, plagen and the like must have been a disease other than the modern plague that reached Hong Kong in May 1894 from other parts of China, and later spread first to India and then to all inhabited continents. Alexandre Yersin showed that the disease in Hong Kong was caused by a bacterium, later named Yersinia pestis. It was also Yersin who claimed that he had found not only the cause of plague in China, but also the cause of the medieval and early modern plague epidemics. Four years after the discovery of the bacillus, Paul-Louis Simond proposed the transmission route from the rat (Rattus rattus) via the flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) to humans, although the scientific community was not fully convinced until ten years later, since this hypothesis did not explain all observations. The problems with the hypothesis were forgotten, which is easy to understand when we remember that the doctors and epidemiologists who were working in India at that time were facing a worsening and very serious epidemic. The simple preventive message to public health workers and the public was: exterminate the rats. The identification of medieval plague as the same disease as modern plague was accepted within thirty years, first by medical scientists and later by historians. Cohn writes, “Without argument, historians and scientists have taken the epidemiology of the modern plague and imposed it on the past, ignoring, denying, even changing contemporary testimony, both narrative and quantitative, when it conflicts with notions of how modern bubonic plague should behave.”2 I agree to some extent with Cohn's criticism of how historians have imposed a modern understanding of plague epidemics in India on historical epidemics, and especially how historians have invented large populations of rats in the medieval towns and countryside of northern Europe without any support from contemporary historical sources or archaeology.3 However, I strongly disagree with his main point, which is that the medieval and modern plague epidemics must have involved different diseases in medical and bacteriological terms. Thus, I argue that Yersinia pestis is the cause of both medieval bubonic plague and modern bubonic plague, and that the symptoms, signs, pathology and pathophysiology are very similar. On the other hand, the two series may have differed in speed of transmission, population mortality and some other epidemiological characteristics because of differences in climate, housing conditions, the availability and population density of flea species and other possible insect vectors, and the availability of susceptible mammals other than rats. Cohn's main arguments are as follows: There is a lack of evidence of involvement of rats and fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis) in late-","PeriodicalId":74144,"journal":{"name":"Medical history. Supplement","volume":"1 1","pages":"59 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0025727300072094","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57088938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The language of plague and its regional perspectives: the case of medieval Germany.","authors":"Kay Peter Jankrift","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":74144,"journal":{"name":"Medical history. Supplement","volume":" ","pages":"53-8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2630034/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"27520003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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