Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting "The Triumph of Death" depicts the turmoil Europe experienced as a result of the plague. The Black Death pandemic was a profound rupture that reshaped the economy, society and culture in Europe.
This intensified religiosity had long-range institutional impacts. Combined with the death of many clergy, fears of sending students on long, dangerous journeys, and the fortuitous appearance of rich bequests, the heightened religiosity inspired the founding of new universities and new colleges at older ones. The proliferation of new centers of learning and debate subtly undermined the unity of Medieval Christianity.
It also set the stage for the rise of stronger national identities and ultimately for the Reformation that split Christianity in the 16 th century. Depiction of the Great Plauge of London in left. A copper engraving of a seventeenth-century plague doctor right.
The disruption caused by the plague also shaped new directions in medical knowledge. Doctors tending the sick during the plague learned from their direct experience and began to rebel against ancient medical doctrine. The Black Death made clear that disease was not caused by an alignment of the stars but from a contagion. Doctors became committed to a new empirical approach to medicine and the treatment of disease. Here, then, lie the distant roots of the Scientific Revolution.
The first quarantine was established in at the Adriatic port of Ragussa. By the s quarantines were routine in the European Mediterranean. Major outbreaks of plague in and in London and Marseille were the result of breakdowns in this quarantine barrier. Michel Serre's painting depicting the plague outbreak in Marseille. Further major outbreaks occurred throughout Europe and the Middle East over the next years — in Constantinople in the years , , and , in Iraq, Egypt and Syria in the years , , , , and and Mesopotamia in and The plague continued in intermittent cycles in Europe into the mid-8th century and did not re-emerge as a major epidemic until the 14th century.
The Black Death of was the first major European outbreak of the second great plague pandemic that occurred over the 14th to 18th centuries. In it was known in the European seaports that a plague epidemic was present in the East. In the plague was brought to the Crimea from Asia Minor by the Tartar armies of Khan Janibeg, who had laid siege to the town of Kaffa now Feodosya in Ukraine , a Genoese trading town on the shores of the Black Sea.
The siege of the Tartars was unsuccessful and before they left, from a description by Gabriel de Mussis from Piacenza, in revenge they catapulted over the walls of Kaffa corpses of people who had died from the Black Death.
The Tartars left Kaffa and carried the plague away with them spreading it further to Russia and India. A description of symptoms of the plague was given by Giovanni Boccaccio in in his book Decameron, a set of tales of a group of Florentines who secluded themselves in the country to escape the plague :.
Some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg, some more, some less, which the common folk called gavocciolo. From the two said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere,..
Butler [11] states the term refers to the haemorrhagic purpura and ischaemic gangrene of the limbs that sometimes ensued from the septicaemia. People were as much afraid they would suffer a spiritual death as they were a physical death since there were no clergy to perform burial rites:.
The sexton and the physician were cast into the same deep and wide grave; the testator and his heirs and executors were hurled from the same cart into the same hole together. Transmission of the disease was thought to be by miasmas, disease carrying vapours emanating from corpses and putrescent matter or from the breath of an infected or sick person.
Others thought the Black Death was punishment from God for their sins and immoral behaviour, or was due to astrological and natural phenomena such as earthquakes, comets, and conjunctions of the planets.
People turned to patron saints such as St Roch and St Sebastian or to the Virgin Mary, or joined processions of flagellants whipping themselves with nail embedded scourges and incanting hymns and prayers as they passed from town to town.
As they always marched two abreast, the procession of the numerous penitents reached farther than the eye could see. Soon there was a shortage of doctors which led to a proliferation of quacks selling useless cures and amulets and other adornments that claimed to offer magical protection. In this second pandemic, plague again caused great social and economic upheaval. Often whole families were wiped out and villages abandoned. Crops could not be harvested, travelling and trade became curtailed, and food and manufactured goods became short.
The villeins prospered and acquired land and property. The plague broke down the normal divisions between the upper and lower classes and led to the emergence of a new middle class.
In the period to the Black Death killed a quarter of the population in Europe, over 25 million people, and another 25 million in Asia and Africa. In when another epidemic of the Black Death re-emerged in Europe, Venice instituted various public health controls such as isolating victims from healthy people and preventing ships with disease from landing at port. The trentena was found to be too short and in in Venice, travellers from the Levant in the eastern Mediterranean were isolated in a hospital for forty days, the quarantena or quaranta giorni , from which we derive the term quarantine.
It was manned by local peasants with checkpoints and quarantine stations to prevent infected people from crossing from eastern to western Europe. In the 15th and 16th centuries doctors wore a peculiar costume to protect themselves from the plague when they attended infected patients, first illustrated in a drawing by Paulus Furst in and later Jean-Jacques described a similar costume worn by the plague doctors at Nijmegen, an old Dutch town in Gelderland, in his work Treatise on the Plague.
They wore a protective garb head to foot with leather or oil cloth robes, leggings, gloves and hood, a wide brimmed hat which denoted their medical profession, and a beak like mask with glass eyes and two breathing nostrils which was filled with aromatic herbs and flowers to ward off the miasmas. They avoided contact with patients by taking their pulse with a stick or issued prescriptions for aromatic herb inhalations passing them through the door, and buboes were lanced with knives several feet long.
Plague continued to occur in small epidemics throughout the world but a major outbreak of the pneumonic plague occurred in Europe and England in to People were incarcerated in their homes, doors painted with a cross. The epidemic reached a peak in September when 7, people per week were dying in London alone.
Plague waxed and waned in Europe until the late 18th century, but not with the virulence and mortality of the 14th century European Black Death. The plague re-emerged from its wild rodent reservoir in the remote Chinese province of Yunnan in In it had reached Canton and then spread to Hong Kong. It had spread to Bombay by and by had reached ports on every continent, carried by infected rats travelling the international trade routes on the new steamships. In the plague came to Australia where the first major outbreak occurred in Sydney, its epicentre at the Darling Harbour wharves, spreading to the city, Surry Hills, Glebe, Leichhardt, Redfern, and The Rocks, and causing deaths.
Haffkine tested it on himself first, then on prison volunteers. By , over four million people had been inoculated. The experience of plague in s Bombay shows just how complex it can be to control an epidemic in large populations.
As with other plague epidemics, the outbreak in India had a major social impact. Many people left the city, causing a significant drop in the population. Many in the infected area were mill workers and the epidemic effectively brought the textile industry to a halt.
The colonial authorities instituted an aggressive programme of anti-plague measures, including house searches for victims, enforced evacuation of residents in infected areas, detention camps for travellers and the exclusion of traditional medicine practitioners from infected areas.
The restrictions were imposed by the Special Plague Committee and enforced by the colonial army. Such tactics caused widespread protests and alarm among the various communities, culminating in the murder of the British chairman of the Special Plague Committee in the city of Pune.
But as with earlier outbreaks, some of the measures laid the foundations for public health in modern India. After the outbreak, the authorities in Bombay set up the Bombay City Improvement Trust to try to create a healthier city. Wider roads were planned to channel fresh sea air into the more crowded areas, as a sanitary measure.
And the Haffkine Institute for infectious disease continues its biomedical research in modern Mumbai formerly Bombay. By the s plague epidemics were a thing of the past. A few small pockets of infection remain around the world, particularly in central Asia where the disease is endemic. But drug resistant forms of the bacteria were identified on the island of Madagascar in In the deadliest outbreak in modern times killed people and infected thousands on the island.
Using techniques such as genome mapping , scientists have been able to identify the exact strains of bubonic plague that they encounter and their origins, making it easier to track the spread of epidemics.
Genetic evidence of the Yersinia pestis bacterium in several plague burial grounds from —, has also confirmed that the Black Death was, in most cases, bubonic plague. The plague epidemics of the past are a reminder of the social as well as medical impact of epidemics. They led to important developments in infectious disease control—many of which we still use. But the continued presence of bubonic plague is a reminder that epidemics are not necessarily a thing of the past.
Keeping troops fighting fit means preventing and dealing with outbreaks of disease, and each theatre of war brings its own challenges. Infection is a major problem facing health services throughout the world—how do hospitals deal with it? Javascript is disabled. Story Content Key facts The Black Death Controlling the spread of plague Epidemic waves across the centuries A bacterial infection is confirmed An international vaccine for a pandemic disease Controlling plague in colonial India Plague today Find out more.
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How Did the Black Death Spread? Understanding the Black Death Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersinia pestis. Recommended for you. Black Death.
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