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Neither the knowledge of astrology nor the study of ancient treatises written by ancient authorities helped. Slow.ru It reminded readers of the world’s repeatedly devastating plague pandemics and how humanity finally discovered what caused it.
Plague is one of the oldest diseases. Its causal agent Yersinia pestis – traces were found in the teeth of people who lived in the Bronze Age five thousand years ago. This bacterium caused two of the largest pandemics in human history and killed several hundred million people. The infection spread like a forest fire, destroying entire cities, and doctors had no means of fighting it, largely due to prejudice and low levels of medical knowledge. Only the invention of antibiotics and vaccines has allowed humanity to overcome the plague, although it still occurs in various parts of the world, including in developed countries.
Photo from Wikipedia.org / Yersinia pestis bacteria is magnified
Witty assassin
The disease begins as a cold or flu: the temperature rises, weakens, and the head begins to ache. The man does not even suspect that the cause of his illness became an invisible bacterial bomb, a flea, whose internal organs are filled with fever sticks.
The insect is forced to swallow the blood swallowed by the wound, and thus an entire army of deadly bacteria enters the body. If the bacteria enters the lymph nodes, the patient develops a bubonic form of the disease. The nodes are severely swollen. In the Middle Ages, they were pierced and burned, which only caused more harm to the patient and was fatally dangerous to those around him.
Wikipedia.org photo / Flea saturated with blood
When the fever adheres to the bloodstream and causes it to clot within the vessels of the circulatory system, a septicemic form of the disease begins. The clots interrupt the nutrition of the tissues and the penetration of non-clotted blood into the skin causes characteristic black rashes. It is believed that it was due to darkening of the skin that the plague pandemic began to be called the Black Death in the Middle Ages. Septicemic plague is less common than its other forms, but its mortality used to be nearly 100 percent until antibiotics were discovered.
And finally, pneumonia is what marked the Black Death. During the first known pandemic, Justinian’s plague, there was little mention of expectoration, but in the Middle Ages, this symptom was as common as that of buboes. The bacteria penetrated the lungs and caused them to become inflamed, and the patient exhaled the fever sticks that entered other people’s respiratory organs. At the time of the Black Death, the disease spread from person to person and vector fleas were no longer needed.
The entry of the pathogen into the lungs in the past almost guaranteed imminent death: without antibiotic treatment, a person died after two or three days. It is the form of pneumonia responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people in the 14th century.
Waves of death
There are three major plague pandemics in world history. Justinian’s plague began in 541 and lasted more than a century in separate waves. This pandemic has killed more than a hundred million people worldwide and destroyed half of the population of Europe. In Constantinople, which at the time was one of the main cities on the continent and worldwide, only one in three inhabitants survived the plague.
Wikipedia.org photo / St. Sebastian prays for Jesus to save the digger’s life in the wake of Justinian’s plague. XV a. A painting by an unknown artist in the late 19th century.
The Black Death, the second wave of the disease, lasted for two decades in the mid-14th century. According to various estimates, it has claimed the lives of between one hundred and two hundred million people worldwide and has become the deadliest pandemic in all of human history.
During the third pandemic, which started in China and lasted for approximately one hundred years (1855 to 1960), more than ten million people died.
The plague’s history began 10,000 years ago, when the soil bacteria was relatively harmless to humans. Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, causing only mild intestinal dysfunction, he underwent several mutations that allowed him to colonize the human lung. Subsequent changes in the Pla gene made the bacteria particularly toxic: it learned to break down proteins in the lungs and spread throughout the body through the lymphatic system, forming bubbles. The same mutations allowed him to pass air drops. As in many other cases, the epidemic was caused by close contact between humans and wildlife.
About four thousand years ago, mutations occurred that caused Yersinia pestis It gained the opportunity to be transmitted to rodents, humans, and other mammals through fleas. The blood-sucking insects that parasitize mammals, along with their hosts, covered long distances. Fleas moved to merchants’ goods and luggage, making trade development one of the causes of the pandemic.
Wikipedia.org photo / Tourniers bury plague victims – a miniature by Pierarto dou Tielto (c. 1353)
Justinian’s plague began in Central Asia, but trade routes initially penetrated Africa and from there they reached Constantinople in Byzantium, a densely populated city and the world center of the first millennium of our era. The bubonic and septicemic forms of the disease during the peak of the epidemic in 544 daily killed five thousand inhabitants of the city.
The black death was caused by another strain of the plague wand that did not develop directly from the fever agent Justinian. One of the factors that contributed to the pandemic is believed to have been the Mongol conquests in the 13th century, which caused a decline in trade and agriculture, followed by famine. Climate change has also had an impact, with prolonged droughts leading to the massive migration of rodents, including whistles, closer to human settlements. Animal gatherings have led to an epizootic, an analogue of a human-to-human epidemic in the wildlife world.
Because whistle meat was considered a delicacy, the spread of the disease among humans became a matter of time. The plague initially hit Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and with merchant ships it also infiltrated Europe, where it claimed the lives of approximately 34 million people.
The third pandemic began with the outbreak of bubonic plague in China in 1855 and then spread to all continents except Antarctica. The natural outbreak was in Yunnan province, where there is still an epidemiological threat of plague.
Wikipedia.org Photograph / Fence Fence Fever in Queensland, Australia, 1900
In the second half of the 19th century, the Chinese began to populate the area more quickly to intensify the extraction of high-demand minerals in the area. This resulted in increased close contact between humans and native rats inhabited by plague-infected fleas. As the urban population grew and heavy traffic flowed, the bubonic plague began to spread outside the area. The plague spread from Hong Kong to British India, claiming the lives of one million people and another 12.5 million in the next three decades.
Dangerous superstitions
As in the case of other pandemics, the prevailing misunderstanding of the causes of infectious diseases prevailed at that time. For medieval doctors, the authority of the ancient thinkers Hippocrates and Aristotle was indisputable. The careful study of his works was obligatory for all those who intended to dedicate their lives to medicine.
According to Hippocrates, the disease is caused by environmental factors and the human way of life. In his time, this idea was essentially very advanced, because until Hippocrates the disease was thought to be caused by the intervention of supernatural forces. However, the ancient Greek doctor had very little knowledge of human anatomy and physiology, so he thought that in order to heal a patient, it was necessary to take proper care of him so that the body could cope with the disease.
Medieval physicians who graduated from universities knew little more about the treatment of disease, but they held a high social position and enjoyed great authority. They had little knowledge of anatomy and considered the surgery to be a dirty boat. Ecclesiastical authorities spoke out against the autopsy, so there were very few universities in Europe that focused on the structure of the human body. The basic principle of medicine was the theory of humor, according to which human health depended on the balance of four fluids: blood, lymph, yellow bile and black bile.
Photo from Wikipedia.org / Typical clothing of plague doctor in the Middle Ages
Many medieval medical theorists believed in Aristotle’s principle that the plague was caused by miasma, dirt that made the air “bad.” Some thought that miasmas had formed due to the unfavorable disposition of heavenly bodies, others blamed earthquakes for everything, the smell of wind from swamps, the unpleasant smell of manure and rotting corpses. One of the medical treatises written in 1365 stated that plague could not be cured without knowledge of humoral theory and astrology, which was very important to a practicing physician.
All preventive measures to combat the plague were limited to the dispersion of poisonous air that supposedly came from the south. Doctors recommended building a house with windows to the north. Costs should also be avoided, as the fact that fever outbreaks began in ports did not go unnoticed by medical authorities. They just couldn’t think that the disease was spreading through trade routes and not into the sea air. In order not to contract the plague, it was supposed to be necessary to hold your breath, breathe through the cloth, and herbal incense. Perfumery, precious stones, and metals such as gold were used to protect against disease.
The bubbles were thought to accumulate plague poisons that needed to be cleaned. They were punctured, burned, and greased with ointment extraction ointments, but in such cases, bacteria that could infect those around them were released into the environment. Although the doctors took what they thought were all necessary precautions, many of them died. Others, realizing that their treatment was ineffective, used their own advice and fled the cities, but the plague caught up with them and moved away from critical points.
Photo from Wikipedia.org / Bubbles in the groin of a person with plague
Although the plague demonstrated the utter powerlessness of medieval medicine, doctors soon overcame their dependence on ancient authorities and began to rely on their own observations and experiences.
A new age
One of the few effective (although not always successful) methods has proven to be quarantine, despite constant protests from freedom-loving citizens and merchants. A deferred entry rule was introduced in Venice. The ships waited 40 days to obtain such a permit (the word “quarantine” comes from the Italian quaranta giorni – “Fourty days”). The same rule was introduced for people who come from plague-infected areas. The municipalities began to hire doctors, doctors specialized in fever, specifically to treat the disease, after which they also closed for quarantine.
As many of the most influential theorists also died during the pandemic, it became easier for new ideas to penetrate medical science. College medicine failed, so people began turning to practitioners more frequently. With the development of surgery, more and more attention was paid to direct studies of the human body. Medical treatises began to be translated from Latin into languages understood by a wider audience, which also stimulated the revision of old ideas and the development of new ones.
Wikipedia.org / Louis Pasteur photo in his lab
In essence, the pandemic has contributed to the development of the health system. The real cause of the plague is Yersinia pestis – It was discovered only a few centuries after Black’s death. Contributing to this was the spread of advanced ideas by Louis Pasteuro, who changed his focus on the causes of various diseases in the 19th century, among scientists.
The scientist, a pioneer in microbiology, was able to demonstrate that infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms, not by miasms or bodily imbalances, as his contemporaries, including the teacher and colleague Claude Bernard, thought. L. Pasteur developed treatments for anthrax, cholera, and rabies, and also founded an institute that became a center for fighting dangerous infections.
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