Whole villages die within a few weeks, and fear spreads even faster than the infectious agent. The social and economic havoc created by the plague was almost beyond imagining, yet it is now being paralleled in many ways by the impact of the Ebola virus epidemic. Ordinary parish burial grounds were insufficient to hold the massive numbers of dead, and new plague cemeteries were opened. Sometimes houses were burned to the ground with the inhabitants inside if they were known to be ill. Few other than those in religious orders dared to nurse the sick. Mothers abandoned husbands and children-and vice versa-for fear of catching the contagion. Some towns barricaded themselves in, afraid to let anyone in who was not already there and equally afraid to let anyone out. Others blamed Jews, foreigners, travelers, and lepers, who were shunned and turned away where once they had been welcomed or at least accepted. Some took it as divine punishment for the world’s wicked ways, possibly the end of the world. When the plague hit in the mid-1300s, no one knew what caused this dreadful pestilence. (Disclosure: I was at Penn State at the time, but I did not serve on DeWitte’s PhD committee.) Because of its severity and the existence of documentary as well as biological evidence, the Black Plague looked like a perfect case to investigate the influence of pandemic disease on human populations. But was it a selective form of death? Anthropologist Sharon DeWitte, who is currently at University of South Carolina, felt the answer could be obtained by studying skeletal remains of plague victims and comparing them to other medieval skeletons buried in normal, nonplague cemeteries, and she tackled that question for her dissertation work at Pennsylvania State University. Certainly the disease took men, women, and children, rich and poor. So many were struck down and so rapidly, that it was long thought that the Black Death killed indiscriminately. This tragedy launched a socioeconomic and evolutionary transformation in Europe that changed the course of history. The disease spread through families, houses, villages, towns, and cities with terrifying speed and staggering mortality. The pandemic moved fast: It often killed a host within days of their first developing the high fever, the telltale rash, and the repellent buboes or swellings in the armpits and groin, which turned black and burst, expelling pus and bacteria. Between 75 and 200 million people died in a few years’ time, starting in 1348 when the plague reached London. The epidemic killed 30 to 50 percent of the entire population of Europe. The Black Death was so extreme that it’s surprising even to scientists who are familiar with the general details.
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