According to one doctor, for example, “instantaneous death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy person standing near and looking at the sick.” How Do You Treat the Black Death? No one knew exactly how the Black Death was transmitted from one patient to another, and no one knew how to prevent or treat it. In the middle of the 14th century, however, there seemed to be no rational explanation for it. Today, this grim sequence of events is terrifying but comprehensible. By the middle of 1348, the Black Death had struck Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and London. Then it reached Rome and Florence, two cities at the center of an elaborate web of trade routes. Not long after it struck Messina, the Black Death spread to the port of Marseilles in France and the port of Tunis in North Africa. Both of these pests could be found almost everywhere in medieval Europe, but they were particularly at home aboard ships of all kinds-which is how the deadly plague made its way through one European port city after another.

They know that the bacillus travels from person to person through the air, as well as through the bite of infected fleas and rats.

(The French biologist Alexandre Yersin discovered this germ at the end of the 19th century.) Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersinia pestis. The Black Death Begins Understanding the Black Death People who were perfectly healthy when they went to bed at night could be dead by morning.ĭid you know? Many scholars think that the nursery rhyme “Ring around the Rosy” was written about the symptoms of the Black Death. The Black Death was terrifyingly, indiscriminately contagious: “the mere touching of the clothes,” wrote Boccaccio, “appeared to itself to communicate the malady to the toucher.” The disease was also terrifyingly efficient. If untreated, the infection can spread to the blood or lungs. The Bubonic Plague attacks the lymphatic system, causing swelling in the lymph nodes. “In men and women alike,” the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio wrote, “at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits…waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils.”īlood and pus seeped out of these strange swellings, which were followed by a host of other unpleasant symptoms-fever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible aches and pains-and then, in short order, death. Symptoms of the Black PlagueĮuropeans were scarcely equipped for the horrible reality of the Black Death. The plague is thought to have originated in Asia over 2,000 years ago and was likely spread by trading ships, though recent research has indicated the pathogen responsible for the Black Death may have existed in Europe as early as 3000 B.C. Indeed, in the early 1340s, the disease had struck China, India, Persia, Syria and Egypt. The Plague How Did the Black Plague Start?Įven before the “death ships” pulled into port at Messina, many Europeans had heard rumors about a “Great Pestilence” that was carving a deadly path across the trade routes of the Near and Far East.

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