Speaker 1: Hey there everyone, it's your old pal Josh and for
Speaker 1: this week's s Y s K Selects, I chose How
Speaker 1: the Black Death Worked. It's a look at a fascinating
Speaker 1: few years when a mystery disease we still don't know
Speaker 1: what it was swept across Europe and Asia and killed
Speaker 1: a significant portion of the world. Check it out and enjoy.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark with me as always as Charles W.
Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant, and that makes this stuff you should know
Speaker 1: the podcast, the audio podcast nothing more? Got it? Not
Speaker 1: a lot less then? Uh, comparably sized podcasts. No, No,
Speaker 1: this is chock full of good stuff. This one's gonna
Speaker 1: be a man do you think so? Oh? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: liked it. You like this one? Yeah? I like some
Speaker 1: of the historical stuff we did. Man, I love it,
Speaker 1: you know, as a history major at one point, love
Speaker 1: of history, Yeah, Chuck. Yes, So we're talking about the
Speaker 1: Black Death, Yeah right, not Black Sabbath like death. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna need some more time, okay, so we'll wait,
Speaker 1: hold on, all right, I'm back, Okay, Yes, Okay, you
Speaker 1: understand now what we're talking about, great chuck um. I
Speaker 1: was researching this to find out like, okay, what's newsy
Speaker 1: about the Black Death? Like, how am I going to
Speaker 1: find an intro? I actually found one, really, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's from two thousand six February two thousand and six. Sorry,
Speaker 1: but there was a study that came out of you
Speaker 1: tricked university. Have you ever heard of the Little Ice Age?
Speaker 1: Uh No, there was a period in um world history,
Speaker 1: global history. I think it may have been kind of
Speaker 1: localized to Europe. So let's say European history in about
Speaker 1: the fifteen hundreds where there was this in explicable period
Speaker 1: of cold. Interesting, right, it's called the Little Ice Age,
Speaker 1: harmful cold. It got cold, like our our conception of
Speaker 1: like why you know, Vikings wear pelts and everything, they're
Speaker 1: always walking around it's very cold, not just because they
Speaker 1: live in Scandinavia, but because it was cold. Then okay,
Speaker 1: so this Little Ice Age, like I said, inexplicable. No
Speaker 1: one had any idea why it happened. And these you
Speaker 1: trecked researchers got that got ahold of some tree sample,
Speaker 1: some leaf samples from eras before the Little Ice age
Speaker 1: and after, and they started counting stomas. These are the
Speaker 1: pores on the leaves. The more stonage you have, the
Speaker 1: more carbon dioxide there is in the air. Leaves developed
Speaker 1: these stomas, they can absorb more c O two, right,
Speaker 1: so if so facto, the more stonage you have, the
Speaker 1: more c O two in the atmosphere. And what they
Speaker 1: found by counting these stone Alma's was that there was
Speaker 1: a lot of c O two prior to the thirteen
Speaker 1: forties in Europe. That means that there's not that much
Speaker 1: c O two. You know that there was a lot
Speaker 1: of c O two in the air in the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: One reason there's a lot of c O two is
Speaker 1: because there's not a lot of trees to soak that
Speaker 1: c O two up. One reason there's not a lot
Speaker 1: of trees is because humans are cutting down the trees
Speaker 1: to farm land, right or just stay warm. There's there's
Speaker 1: fewer trees deforestation brought on by human activity. Okay, So
Speaker 1: what they find then is that after fifty roughly, there's
Speaker 1: suddenly fewer stomas, which means that there's less c O
Speaker 1: two in there, which means that there's more trees. Do
Speaker 1: you know, eitherre are more trees, do you. I have
Speaker 1: a pretty good guess it's because in between that time,
Speaker 1: the thirteen forties and the thirteen fifties, the Black Death
Speaker 1: happened and so many people die that it had a
Speaker 1: measurable effect on the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because
Speaker 1: of not that many trees, and then suddenly lots of
Speaker 1: trees because there was no one to tend this farmland
Speaker 1: in the interesting you know what else. This was a
Speaker 1: tidbit from the end, but we might as well say
Speaker 1: it here. They think that there is a lack of
Speaker 1: genetic diversity in the UK today because of the Black Death.
Speaker 1: They were much more genetically diverse than the eleventh century.
Speaker 1: It represented what's called the population Bottlenecke. Million people died,
Speaker 1: about a third of the population of Europe, which is
Speaker 1: mind boggling. Yeah, it is all right, let's do it. Well.
Speaker 1: I was reading this one his story in his name
Speaker 1: is Skip Knox, and I don't know where he is now.
Speaker 1: But when he wrote that it was at the university,
Speaker 1: you know, Boise State, and he said, um abroncos he
Speaker 1: goes it's uh, it's worth saying this has never happened
Speaker 1: before or since death was an event like this where
Speaker 1: within about to three years million people died. That's never
Speaker 1: happened before. I mean, no war can account for that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no other pandemic. Yeah, it's this. This was it. This
Speaker 1: was as bad as it gets, and it was bad
Speaker 1: so big that it was bad. And it was bad
Speaker 1: not just because of the ultimate devastation, but it was
Speaker 1: bad because of how gnarly the Black Death is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why don't you wanted to talk about some symptoms? All right?
Speaker 1: If you had the Black Death, this is what you
Speaker 1: had to look forward to. First of all, you had
Speaker 1: no idea what was happening to you. Neither did your doctor,
Speaker 1: neither did your local cardinal or bishop. And you know,
Speaker 1: they didn't know a lot back then, but they had
Speaker 1: their like cock eye theories. At least they didn't even
Speaker 1: have cock eye theories on this. They had a cock
Speaker 1: eyed theory that everybody went along with. They developed something.
Speaker 1: But initially they're like, I don't know what this is.
Speaker 1: But you have these big tumor lumps, you got them
Speaker 1: on your body, you got black spots. Well to tell
Speaker 1: them about the tumors somewhere small, but they could get
Speaker 1: pretty big. Yeah, some as big as an apple, And
Speaker 1: they said in the article here that if you had
Speaker 1: one on your neck, it could permanently, like cut your
Speaker 1: head to one side, permanently, meaning like the five days
Speaker 1: you had left. I know, I hope it's okay to
Speaker 1: laugh a little bit this now. And you surely know. Um,
Speaker 1: you had pus using out of sores, open sores. You
Speaker 1: had a nasty smell because you were rotting from the
Speaker 1: inside out. Your breath was awful, it was gruesome, purple splotches.
Speaker 1: God's tokens, right, Yeah, they call them God's tokens, because
Speaker 1: once you got these, that means God's going to take
Speaker 1: you off the earth pretty soon. That's God's token. Fevers
Speaker 1: that could fry your brain, send you into delirium, vomiting,
Speaker 1: coughing up blood, blood, and puss using. I've already said
Speaker 1: it's worth twice. So, um, those are some of the symptoms.
Speaker 1: And once you start having the simp ums, you are
Speaker 1: pretty much done for within a matter of days. Right.
Speaker 1: And so in our modern day it takes a little
Speaker 1: while to bury somebody, even with this machinery that we
Speaker 1: used to to dig modern graves. Um. But back then
Speaker 1: it took even longer to dig a grave to hold
Speaker 1: the service to bury somebody. And when people die within
Speaker 1: days and suddenly there was like a third of the
Speaker 1: population dying off. There was no time to bury anybody,
Speaker 1: no space even there's literally stacking up dogs eating corpses.
Speaker 1: It saysn't here children hungry babies beside their dead mothers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Molly edmans. Really when I wrote this, man, um, Yes,
Speaker 1: but that's the truth. I mean, that was crazy. That
Speaker 1: was the raw truth. That was an ugly, ugly, ugly scene.
Speaker 1: And of course anyone who see Monty Python knows that
Speaker 1: there are people who operated carts that banged on land pots.
Speaker 1: Since I bring out your dead, why s k, Well,
Speaker 1: we'll get into the flinging. Of course is too well,
Speaker 1: let's get into the flinging, because that's kind of how
Speaker 1: it started. Um. And first I want to point out
Speaker 1: the Black Death, you know, gripped Europe. It did not
Speaker 1: only impact Europe. It's so funny, it's so eurocentric the
Speaker 1: way we approached the Black Death. It started in the
Speaker 1: Gobi Desert sometime in the late thirteen twenties in China.
Speaker 1: China lost thirty five million people in the fourteenth century
Speaker 1: from the Black Death. No one ever mentioned. They always
Speaker 1: hear about the Europe the Black Death in Europe, so
Speaker 1: it was localized, and it was actually in in Asia
Speaker 1: and Central Asia um for a decade or two um.
Speaker 1: But they blame it pretty squarely on the Genoese for
Speaker 1: bringing it to Europe, right, yes, how did the Genoese
Speaker 1: get it? Well? In thirty seven in Kafa, which is
Speaker 1: modern day Ukraine, it was a Genoese trading post. They
Speaker 1: were attacked by the Tartar army. Uh, Tartars start to
Speaker 1: die off by the plague, and the Genoese are like, sweet,
Speaker 1: God is punishing our enemies and they're dying, Let's have
Speaker 1: a big party and celebrate. And then the Tartars are like, well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna start flinging our dead corpses over the wall
Speaker 1: at you because the smell is so awful. You will
Speaker 1: die from the smell. There. It was a stupid idea,
Speaker 1: but stupid idea but at work because they actually what
Speaker 1: they were doing. What they were doing was germ warfare,
Speaker 1: very early germ warfare. Right. They had it wrong though
Speaker 1: they thought it was a smell. Actually it was this pestilence.
Speaker 1: And so the Genoese, you know, said oh, we need
Speaker 1: to get rid of these nasty bodies, but it was
Speaker 1: too late. They were infected. By that point. The Genoese
Speaker 1: fled to Sicily and then from there it took two
Speaker 1: pass one. Uh where was the first one? The well?
Speaker 1: The first one went up through um Austria and Germany,
Speaker 1: and then the second path went through um Italy to
Speaker 1: France to the UK. Yes, at a speed which doesn't
Speaker 1: sound fast, but it really is. If you're talking about
Speaker 1: black death, about two and a half miles a day.
Speaker 1: And not only is it fast, like even by today's standards,
Speaker 1: this is before This is when people were riding horses
Speaker 1: and carts and the two real it's lightning fastest toll.
Speaker 1: It trained fast for that time. Yeah, yeah, Why is
Speaker 1: it called the black death? Actually? Do you know this?
Speaker 1: I do, so there's a there's a mistranslation. At some point,
Speaker 1: well back in the day, people called that the big
Speaker 1: death or the great mortality, the big death, that's bad.
Speaker 1: That's what they called it as it as it was happening,
Speaker 1: right and then um later on it came to be
Speaker 1: known as the um ultra morse, which is Latin for
Speaker 1: terrible death or black death. At some point in time,
Speaker 1: somebody decided that they liked the Black Death better. Uh.
Speaker 1: In sometime in the eighteenth century when they were using
Speaker 1: it to differentiate the um plague of London in sixteen
Speaker 1: sixty five, but they mistranslated. It wasn't originally called the
Speaker 1: Black Death or the um Terrible Death. It was called
Speaker 1: the Big Death. And then it just kind of went
Speaker 1: from there all right. Well, at the time, King Philip
Speaker 1: the sixth of France turned it over to the Paris
Speaker 1: College of Physicians, who were they were like the Mayo
Speaker 1: Clinic of the time, and they said, here, we need
Speaker 1: to figure out what this is. What is it? Smartest
Speaker 1: doctors in the world, and they says, we know, we
Speaker 1: figured it out. It's all here on the report. This
Speaker 1: is uh. This happened when Saturn and Jupiter and Mars
Speaker 1: lined up in Aquarius, and Jupiter's roll wet and hot
Speaker 1: and it soaked up the evil vapors from the earth
Speaker 1: and Mars is dry, so it exploded those purse and
Speaker 1: now it is a fog of death. And they very
Speaker 1: smugly pinpointed the time that it happened, one pm on
Speaker 1: March and they just shook their heads like but they
Speaker 1: did say it was a fog of death. My guess
Speaker 1: is that it was probably pretty foggy for some reason,
Speaker 1: some weather system happened, or they were onto something like
Speaker 1: it was being transmitted through the air somehow, which you know,
Speaker 1: they might have been actually onto something there with an
Speaker 1: airborne pathogen possibly, but instead they went with the fog
Speaker 1: of death from the planet's aligning. And another term for
Speaker 1: a fog of death is a miasthma. It's a corrupted
Speaker 1: bit of air. And this is what Europe went with, right, Yeah, like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: these are the smartest guys as far as medicine goes.
Speaker 1: They have the longest crow'sbeak masks of anybody, um, and
Speaker 1: we're gonna go with this fog of death thing, So
Speaker 1: how do we combat it? And what they figured out was, well,
Speaker 1: since you're breathing this fall, you gotta keep the fog
Speaker 1: at bay, and one good way to do that is
Speaker 1: to fight fog with fire smoke. So there were fires everywhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were recommended to burn um aromatic woods, so people
Speaker 1: would and people even carry this stuff around rosemary, amber
Speaker 1: and musk. The Pope even stood between two fires when
Speaker 1: he addressed people. Yeah, they kept him burning on street corners. Um.
Speaker 1: And then there were the fact that it was coming
Speaker 1: from the south and it was a fog of death.
Speaker 1: They started putting glass in their southern windows so that
Speaker 1: the southern wing couldn't penetrate it. See that kind of
Speaker 1: smart there it is. They weren't all hokey. Now, some
Speaker 1: that seemed kind of smart. What didn't seem very smart
Speaker 1: was don't bathe don't have physical intimacy, although it's a
Speaker 1: good way to spread disease, so maybe they're onto something there. Um,
Speaker 1: don't sleep during the daytime. They had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with spreading it. They're like, just don't be lazy, avoid
Speaker 1: sad thoughts about disease. It's something to that if you
Speaker 1: believe in the mind, uh, if you believe in positive
Speaker 1: psychology exactly. So some of the little hokey there was
Speaker 1: a little substance to a bit of it. Um. I
Speaker 1: have a little cocktail tidbit for you, though, so awesome.
Speaker 1: I don't know. The word quarantine actually comes from the
Speaker 1: Black Death in Venice, Italy. They were pretty smart and
Speaker 1: they said, you know what, we should start isolating some
Speaker 1: of these ships of people that are coming in, not
Speaker 1: let them come on land until we know that no
Speaker 1: one on board is is sick. So let's do this
Speaker 1: for like thirty days. And then they went, now that's
Speaker 1: not long enough. It's just do it for forty days.
Speaker 1: Forty days or quawan quaranti giane quarantine. That's where the
Speaker 1: word came from. Well it's not as much of a
Speaker 1: stretch of somebody besides, Chuck is pronouncing it. But yes,
Speaker 1: that is where quarantine. You look at it, it looks
Speaker 1: like the word quarantine. Yeah, so that's pretty smart too.
Speaker 1: There are some smart people. Still, six of the population
Speaker 1: of this died within I think eighteen months. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: the quarantine, while practical and useful, you know, didn't protect everybody. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, we don't know what the doctors were
Speaker 1: doing that much because all we have here is just
Speaker 1: recorded documents of what was going on. Well there there
Speaker 1: there wasn't even documentation. It was popular writers, church writers.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like science journals. I mean, not a lot
Speaker 1: of people knew how to read and write during this time.
Speaker 1: And the ones who did normally were affiliated with the church,
Speaker 1: so they would have had a very religious view of
Speaker 1: what was going on. Right, Um, they're probably blood letting there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the like the physicians that were working the crow's mass
Speaker 1: guys um were uh blood letting. They were um opening
Speaker 1: up these bu bos, which is it's almost like a
Speaker 1: textual representation of a pussy boo. They would open these
Speaker 1: and drain them because that made sense to get rid
Speaker 1: of whatever is in there, I guess, very small. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: we still do that today, Poppins. It's yeah every Tuesday. Uh.
Speaker 1: Religion comes into play pretty heavily there because a lot
Speaker 1: of people said, you know, let's let's turn to God
Speaker 1: and pray for help. Well, a lot of people thought
Speaker 1: that this was punishment from God. Oh yeah, the flagellents,
Speaker 1: so only he could do anything about it or she
Speaker 1: depending in New York and um, so yes, the flagellents,
Speaker 1: chuck take it with the fligillents of Germany. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: brotherhood of the flood Flagellents had our vigilance. Flagelence had
Speaker 1: already been around, not flagilens though, no very big difference. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're already around. But they rose up, like you said,
Speaker 1: in Germany in the in the mid thirteen forties, and
Speaker 1: they thought it was punishment from God. And they thought,
Speaker 1: you know what, we're gonna do something about it. So
Speaker 1: you've heard of self flagellation, that's where it comes from.
Speaker 1: They would walk barefoot across Europe whipping themselves with their
Speaker 1: little whatever cat of nine tails. Uh scourges, scourges like
Speaker 1: what have you that had like sharp kind of barbed
Speaker 1: and uh. It didn't work though, and a lot of
Speaker 1: people turned against God because of that. They also killed
Speaker 1: a lot of Jews. The flagellents did a flagelence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they killed Jews. They would kill clergy that opposed them,
Speaker 1: except for the Pope. And the Pope was like, you're
Speaker 1: officially denounced, and I think thirteen forty nine and that
Speaker 1: was it for the flagelence, although they popped up again
Speaker 1: in later um plugues and pestilences, but they stopped for
Speaker 1: the black death like immediately when they denounced them. Well,
Speaker 1: they killed Jews because there was a pretty bad rumor
Speaker 1: going around that the Jews had, uh, we're poisoning the
Speaker 1: water supply. And because at the time Christians and Jews
Speaker 1: lived separately, largely, a lot of Jewish Jewish communities were
Speaker 1: effectively quarantined so they didn't get hit as hard. So
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, Jews are I don't know prosperings
Speaker 1: the right word, but they're not dying like the Christians are.
Speaker 1: So so the Christians started burns. He started burning them alive.
Speaker 1: Apparently in Strasbourg, the Germany was more Jews died in
Speaker 1: Germany than anywhere else. Um at the hands of Christians
Speaker 1: who were upset about the plague um and in Strasburg
Speaker 1: in uh, let's see um, I think thirty eight on
Speaker 1: one day, two d Jews were burned alive at the stake,
Speaker 1: just that one city, on that one day. And apparently
Speaker 1: entire communities used to be walled up and set on
Speaker 1: fire with everybody, or Jews would convert to Christianity on
Speaker 1: the spot, or they would set their own houses on fire,
Speaker 1: which is kind of sensible, like, oh, look, my house
Speaker 1: is already on fire. Better, I should probably take off,
Speaker 1: keep on walking, see you guys later. Well, a lot
Speaker 1: of Jews fled to the countryside, didn't they too, because
Speaker 1: they were able to Yeah, good for them, is what
Speaker 1: I said. Well, I don't think it was just Jews.
Speaker 1: I think anybody who had the means of going to
Speaker 1: the countryside, which is crazy because I mean, like going
Speaker 1: to the countryside means like stepping out your back to
Speaker 1: where I thought in like the fourteenth century. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: apparently there were still the wealthy went out to the
Speaker 1: country once in a while and they would Yeah that's
Speaker 1: why SKO. So it was needless to say it was
Speaker 1: a really rough few years for europe um and by
Speaker 1: thirteen fifty two it was largely gone. Yeah, it just
Speaker 1: took off. But what I mean there was It's not
Speaker 1: like all right, black desk on, everything's cool now. They
Speaker 1: were like huge, huge effects. Apparently the um self flagellation worked, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: sure that's what it was. Well, yeah, you have to
Speaker 1: imagine if a third right, so that means that between you,
Speaker 1: me and Jerry, one of us dies, but it clearly
Speaker 1: be me. It's not necessarily true. I'd set myself on fire. Um, okay,
Speaker 1: so then two of us would have died, right, Um,
Speaker 1: I mean a third a third of of this this
Speaker 1: population within like seriously, like two years, is just gone.
Speaker 1: People are um being eaten by dogs or corpses are
Speaker 1: being eaten by dogs in the streets. Families are just
Speaker 1: completely abandoning one another once they get sick. The whole
Speaker 1: um social psyche, the collective psyche of Europe just kind
Speaker 1: of crumble a little bit. It took a pretty big ding,
Speaker 1: and one of the places it took that ding was
Speaker 1: in religion. A lot of heretical society sprung up because
Speaker 1: it was like, either this was your work, God, or
Speaker 1: you didn't do anything to help us, so we're not
Speaker 1: coming to church anymore. Well yeah, Instead of being like
Speaker 1: really thankful that they survived, people uh partied like it
Speaker 1: was nineteen nine, basically big time crazy parties. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: lot of debauchery, lots of debauchery. Um uh. There was
Speaker 1: an economic impact to a huge one. Well yeah, if
Speaker 1: half your sorry, if a third of the workforce is gone,
Speaker 1: you've got no one working, So labor is gonna skyrocket.
Speaker 1: The price of labor is the price of labor is
Speaker 1: cost of goods food, you know, the little silver lining.
Speaker 1: Their food was in supply because there weren't as many
Speaker 1: people to eat it, exactly. Sadly. The other cool thing though,
Speaker 1: is it's potentially we saw the birth of modern science
Speaker 1: and medicine because of the Black Death. Because the leaders
Speaker 1: we're like, you know, this whole planet's aligning thing was
Speaker 1: pretty stupid now that we look back at it, so
Speaker 1: why don't we found some schools and do some real
Speaker 1: research based on physical science and give that a whirl.
Speaker 1: And then it started it it worked, which is some
Speaker 1: kind of ironic as well, because is the population was
Speaker 1: so decimated that it even after they had this idea,
Speaker 1: they had to wait a little while to reopen schools
Speaker 1: because they couldn't staff them. Oh yeah, um. And also, Chuck,
Speaker 1: there were there was an almost complete loss of any
Speaker 1: illusions about death and whether or not it's coming for you. Um.
Speaker 1: There's a whole allegory and art that um that sprang
Speaker 1: up at the time called Dance macab which was the
Speaker 1: dance of Death, which is basically like you know, showing
Speaker 1: living people and skeletons, you know, working side by side
Speaker 1: or um, hanging out or partying together or whatever. And
Speaker 1: the point of that is that you know, death can
Speaker 1: come at any time and it's coming for everybody. So
Speaker 1: art and poetry and things like that just took a
Speaker 1: real downer turn there for a while because that was
Speaker 1: clearly what everyone was thinking about at the time. That's right, Chuck,
Speaker 1: Uh what caused it? See, this is where I get
Speaker 1: a little, um a little confused, because there's conflicting information
Speaker 1: even to this day. Well, it's um one of the
Speaker 1: things where we thought we figured it out. But uh,
Speaker 1: modern techniques and modern investigation have kind of led us
Speaker 1: to think, as you like that, I have have led
Speaker 1: us to think that maybe that first idea hasn't wasn't right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the first idea came out of the third pandemic, which
Speaker 1: was in eight in Hong Kong and India. Right um.
Speaker 1: And two bacteriologists, Alexander Yerson and uh Shibasaburo Kitasato, thanks um.
Speaker 1: They worked independently and isolated the cause of that third pandemic,
Speaker 1: and it is what we know today as bubonic plague.
Speaker 1: It's a bacterium called your Cina pestis um, named after
Speaker 1: Alexander Jerson, right um, and it lives in the four
Speaker 1: gut of fleas, rodent fleas that feast on rats. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this was interesting, I thought, because the fleat bites the
Speaker 1: regular fleet um bites rat and drinks blood. And it's like,
Speaker 1: oh man, that was fantastic. Uh. If you're infected with
Speaker 1: the your sena, you're sending a pestis in your flee
Speaker 1: You bite the rodent and you eat the blood. But
Speaker 1: it gets stuck in your foregut, and so you never
Speaker 1: feel that quench of that tasty, tasty blood in your
Speaker 1: stomach if your flee. So you keep biting more and
Speaker 1: more rodents and infecting more and more rodes because you're,
Speaker 1: like we talked about with the fleas, regurgitating it back
Speaker 1: onto rodents, and all of a sudden you're killing all
Speaker 1: these rodents and then when there are no more rodents
Speaker 1: and the fleas will go to people. And so they
Speaker 1: thought that's how it was spread, which makes sense because
Speaker 1: it's not like um conditions were really sanitary in the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, or there were plenty of before the Middle Ages,
Speaker 1: um the fourteenth century, right, yeah, um, yeah, there were
Speaker 1: plenty of rats, plenty of fleas um. The problem is
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of discrepancy is between bubonic plague
Speaker 1: or your sena, your Cinea pestis and whatever. The Black
Speaker 1: Death was right, so you've got like a big discrepancies.
Speaker 1: You've got um bubos right with both, but bubo is
Speaker 1: under the bubonic plague. Um tend to spring up around
Speaker 1: the growing area only, and descriptions of bubos with the
Speaker 1: Black Death where that they were all over the place,
Speaker 1: all over your body. Um bubos or bubonic plague doesn't
Speaker 1: cause um purple splotches. It doesn't cause delirium, doesn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or the vomiting um, blood and and pus and all
Speaker 1: that stuff. There's a lot of stuff that was documented
Speaker 1: widely by different sources during the Black Death that doesn't
Speaker 1: have anything in common with bubonic plague. Well, the big
Speaker 1: one to me was the fact that bubonic plague, even
Speaker 1: if you don't treat it as mortality rate of about
Speaker 1: and from the sounds of the Black Death, it was
Speaker 1: you know, near a hundred taken down entire villages, right,
Speaker 1: So they did figure out that the third pandemic in
Speaker 1: eight was caused by your cine a pestus bubonic plague,
Speaker 1: but they erroneously possibly attributed it to the Black Death.
Speaker 1: But for about a hundred years, that was the premise
Speaker 1: that everyone went on was bubonic plague was the Black
Speaker 1: Death until Night four and some researchers who have been
Speaker 1: dubbed um plague deniers, Yeah, I have started to come
Speaker 1: up with competing theories and there's there's some interesting ones. Yes.
Speaker 1: Sociologists Susan Scott and biologist Christopher Duncan I think that
Speaker 1: it is a hemorrhagic fever like ebola. Makes sense, sure,
Speaker 1: some say anthrax or maybe some just disease that is
Speaker 1: not around, some extinct disease right, like it went extinct
Speaker 1: somehow after after the Black Death. The thing though, is
Speaker 1: this d n A study in the nineteen nineties they
Speaker 1: dug up some corpses from mat s graves in France
Speaker 1: tested the teeth because I guess dental pulps about the
Speaker 1: only thing you can test at that point, and they
Speaker 1: did find that the y pestis in the samples, so
Speaker 1: they said, oh, yeah, so it was a plague. But
Speaker 1: then they apparently looked at other bodies from other grave
Speaker 1: sites and that it wasn't conclusive, so they didn't find
Speaker 1: it at all. So what does that mean? I don't know.
Speaker 1: What do you think? Um? Well, Skip Knox, that historian
Speaker 1: I referred to earlier, his um his theory is that
Speaker 1: it was bubonic plague working in concert with the mnemonic plague,
Speaker 1: so it was respiratory which is um bubo pneumonic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which basically his ideas that there are two plagues working
Speaker 1: at once, or that's the theory he subscribed to, which
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's it seems likelier to me that
Speaker 1: there's probably some bacterium that's either extinct or worse than
Speaker 1: that dormant. Right, right, let's hope it's extinct. Dormants the
Speaker 1: word I want to be hearing right now. Oh, and
Speaker 1: there's one other thing that was a problem with the fleas.
Speaker 1: There were two other problems that we didn't mention. One
Speaker 1: was that there should have been a die off of rats,
Speaker 1: because remember they jumped from rats to humans when there's
Speaker 1: no more rats and there's no documented die off of
Speaker 1: rats in Europe before the plague ever. Um. And then secondly, um,
Speaker 1: what was the same winter should kill fleas, that's right, Chuck,
Speaker 1: but it didn't. Well are they does kill fleas, but
Speaker 1: it didn't have any effect on the spread of the
Speaker 1: Black Death. Yeah. Well. The other problem though, is it's
Speaker 1: like we said, it's all stuff that's written down, so
Speaker 1: it's not like, you know, you said the bubos are
Speaker 1: near the growing area. But at the time, you know,
Speaker 1: with the sensationalism of of the day, people they could
Speaker 1: have been writing, you know, sores all over their body,
Speaker 1: and you know, they could have exaggerated some of the
Speaker 1: symptoms because of fear. Uh. Yeah, I just don't know
Speaker 1: how much I trust the records of hundreds in Europe well. Plus, Also,
Speaker 1: there was no standardized medical jargon either for them to use.
Speaker 1: You know that's true too, so or that that they
Speaker 1: could use that we would understand. Yeah, so we're cobbling
Speaker 1: together what we think they meant, what this one person meant,
Speaker 1: but they think the numbers of deaths are pretty accurately. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is pretty crazy. One third. Oh, and we're talking
Speaker 1: about how it's so eurocentric in Cairo, seven thousand deaths
Speaker 1: a day at its peak, the bubonic plaque for black
Speaker 1: death sorry the black death. Wow. Yeah, let's say for
Speaker 1: black death. If you want to see some pretty cool
Speaker 1: pictures um and read more about it, I strongly recommend
Speaker 1: this one. Type in black death in the search bar
Speaker 1: at how stuff Works dot com. And it's time now
Speaker 1: for a listener mail. Josh. I'm gonna call this our
Speaker 1: second to mafia mail. Sometimes we get so much mail
Speaker 1: from one topic that we feel like we should read
Speaker 1: more than one email on the topic, especially when accompanied
Speaker 1: by physical threats. That's right. So this is from Kate
Speaker 1: the Canuck Stewart. That's what she calls herself, which I
Speaker 1: thought it's kind of funny. Hi, Josh and Chuck and Jerry.
Speaker 1: I'm a huge fan of the podcast, but I've never
Speaker 1: written in before because I never had much to say
Speaker 1: besides oh my gosh, I love you guys. It's a
Speaker 1: great reason right in by the way. Um. However, after
Speaker 1: listening to the Mafia cast, I just had to write
Speaker 1: you an email to have some info for my family's past.
Speaker 1: My grandmother on my mother's side, it's a second cousin
Speaker 1: to the infamous Lucky Luciano. Most of the men and
Speaker 1: her family were made and although she was largely kept
Speaker 1: out of the loop when it came to the wheelings
Speaker 1: and underdealings of her family, like Diane Keaton and the Godfather, Uh,
Speaker 1: there is one event that really brought home the kinds
Speaker 1: of things her brother and cousins were up to. When
Speaker 1: my mom was only a baby, my grandfather ran out
Speaker 1: on my grandma. When my great uncle heard about this,
Speaker 1: he and his cousins asked my grandma if she wanted
Speaker 1: them to take care of him for her. She really
Speaker 1: didn't know what that meant, but responded, maybe even jokingly,
Speaker 1: well don't kill him or anything. The next day, she
Speaker 1: got a phone call that her husband had been admitted
Speaker 1: to a hospital, badly beaten, with both of his legs broken. Clearly,
Speaker 1: it wasn't prudent to mess around with members of my family.
Speaker 1: There are other rumors swirling around about different ventures that
Speaker 1: my great uncle and cousins were involved in, but they
Speaker 1: were notoriously tight lipped about everything. As far as I know,
Speaker 1: no one in my family is a part of the
Speaker 1: mob anymore, and no one has the broken legs. No
Speaker 1: one has broken the legs of any of my ex boyfriends.
Speaker 1: But I wouldn't date you just to be on the
Speaker 1: safe site. Huh. That is Kate the Canuck Um. Thanks
Speaker 1: a lot, Kate appreciate that, and all you Canucks listening
Speaker 1: out there, thank you very much. If you want to
Speaker 1: get in touch with Chuck or me Um, you can
Speaker 1: get in touch with us via Twitter, that's right at
Speaker 1: s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook,
Speaker 1: dot com, slash so have you you Know? Send us
Speaker 1: an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com,
Speaker 1: and as always, go check out our home on the web,
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know
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