The Black Death
By Brendon Abbeel
The Plague
The Plague started in China around the 1330's. The disease itself, Yersinia Pestis, was carried by rats and other small rodents. Fleas would then bite the rats and get the disease transmitted to them; the fleas would later go and attach themselves to humans and bite them, therefore giving humans the disease. During the spread of the Plague, around 1347, 12 European trading ships came over to trade with Asia. But after docking back at the Sicilian port of Messina, their greeters were surprised to see most crew members dead, and others who were alive were gravely ill. The body of the dead were covered in black and purple dots, hence were the disease got its name, “The Black Death.”
The Spread of Black Death
The Black death quickly spread across Europe, killing thousands of people each week, which led to the pile up of bodies on the street. When someone got Black Death the symptoms were horrible and people, once infected, only lived two to four days before death. The effects were mainly painful swelling of the lymph nodes. Lymph nodes are oval-shaped organs of the immune system, distributed widely throughout the body, including the armpit and stomach. They act as filters or traps for foreign particles and are important in the proper functioning of the immune system. Other symptoms included high fever, delirium, vomiting, muscular pains, bleeding in the lungs, and an intense desire to sleep.
People of The Plague
As word of the disease spread, people began to get more and more worried. The towns were hit harder with the disease than the countryside because of poor sanitation. People would lock their doors thinking the disease wouldn’t come in. The people also wore flowers to rid the smell of the dead around them. The air would be filled with ash as the homes of the dead were burnt to the ground. People thought this epidemic was a punishment from God for being bad. So if you did something wrong you were thought to quickly become ill and die.
A Search For The Cure
People soon decided to try to come up with cures for the disease. One of these cures was letting someone bleed out. The people thought the disease was in the blood, and that if enough blood was let out the disease would leave the body. Another idea to cure the disease was witchcraft. People would place a live hen next to the swelling to draw out the pestilence from the body. To aid recovery, they would drink a glass of their own urine twice a day. Today, these "cures" seem completely absurd, but to them it was reasonable.
How Did The Plague Influence Modern Day Society?
Because of this tragic event in history, medical industries have spent billions of dollars researching and developing new medicines to insure nothing like this will ever happen again. Like now, if you have been exposed to a plague, there are
certain antibiotics you can take before you get sick as a way to prevent
illness. These antibiotics can prevent plague disease even after the plague
bacteria have already gotten into your body. They work best when you take them as soon as you get exposed to the disease. Since we have developed all these new medicines, outbreaks like this are less likely to occur.
Work Cited
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