“The Plague in the Stairway,” by Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen
You know how they taught you in school that the Black Plague was caused by fleas carried by rats?
At least according to one scholar, this is probably a slander on fleas and rats.
“The evidence just isn’t there to support it,” said Barney Sloane, author of The Black Death in London. “We ought to be finding great heaps of dead rats in all the waterfront sites but they just aren’t there. And all the evidence I’ve looked at suggests the plague spread too fast for the traditional explanation of transmission by rats and fleas. It has to be person to person – there just isn’t time for the rats to be spreading it.”
He added: “It was certainly the Black Death but it is by no means certain what that disease was, whether in fact it was bubonic plague.”
People at the time believed it was caused by “bad air.” Maybe they were right, if it was caused by human-to-human contact.
G. K. Chesterton would have loved that.
Pneumonic Plague? That’s always been Jessica’s theory, anyway. . . And both bubonic and pneumonic plague fit different contemporary descriptions of the plague.
Who knows?
What did Chesterton say that would bring him into this conversation?
Chesterton always enjoyed pointing out situations where the moderns were mistaken, and medievals were right.
I listened to a historical narrative a little bit ago and wondered casually why the rats didn’t die sooner. People died so quickly, but the rats seemed to live with the disease for entire sea voyages and more. Contrast that with a story that one girl out of a whole town survived the disease and lived with animals for some years before being discovered again. Why?
You know, if space aliens had come to earth during that time, they may have killed us all in order to stop the plague from evolving into something stronger that would threaten the delicate, delicate balance of interstellar life.
The medieval monks were always right about the true cause, though–pointless war. They actually spent some time and effort to tell the nobles that they faced God’s wrath if they kept up wars against Christians for greed. The wars continued, causing food-shortage, disease, and a great breeding ground for the Black Death. Maybe God intervened directly, but it seems he didn’t have to–just let the consequences of humans’ actions take over.