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How the Black Death Worked · Stuff You Should Know

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Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
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Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
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Speaker 1: from house stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
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Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always this
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Speaker 1: Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this stuff you
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Speaker 1: should know the podcast, the audio podcast. Nothing more? Got it?
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Speaker 1: Not a lot less then comparably sized podcasts. No, no,
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Speaker 1: this is chock full of good stuff. This one's good
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Speaker 1: of man, do you think so? Oh? Yeah, I liked it.
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Speaker 1: You like this one? Yeah? I like some of the
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Speaker 1: historical stuff we did. Man, I love it. You know,
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Speaker 1: as a history major at one point, I love history, yeah, Chuck. Yes,
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Speaker 1: So we're talking about the Black Death, yeah right, not
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Speaker 1: Black Sabbath like death. Well, I'm gonna need some more
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Speaker 1: time now, okay, so we'll wait, hold on, okay, alright,
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Speaker 1: I'm back. Yes, you understand now what we're talking about? Great, chuck. Um.
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Speaker 1: I was researching this to find out, like, okay, what's
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Speaker 1: newsy about the Black Death? Like? How am I going
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Speaker 1: to find an intro? I actually found one? Really, Yeah,
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Speaker 1: it's it's from two thousand six, February two thousand and six. Sorry,
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Speaker 1: but there was a study that came out of you
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Speaker 1: tricked university. Have you ever heard of the Little Ice Age?
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Speaker 1: There was a period in um world history, global history.
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Speaker 1: I think it may have been kind of localized to Europe.
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Speaker 1: So let's say European history in about the fifteen hundreds,
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Speaker 1: where there was this inexplicable period of cold. Interesting, right,
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Speaker 1: it's called the Little Ice Age, harmful cold. It got cold,
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Speaker 1: like our our conception of like why you know, vikings
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Speaker 1: were pelts and everything, they're always walking around it's very cold,
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Speaker 1: not just because they live in skin navya, but because
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Speaker 1: it was cold. Then okay, so this Little Ice Age,
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Speaker 1: like I said, inexplicable. No one had any idea why
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Speaker 1: it happened. And these you tricked researchers got that got
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Speaker 1: ahold of some tree samples, some leaf samples from eras
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Speaker 1: before the Little Ice Age and after, and they started
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Speaker 1: counting stomas. These are the pores on the leaves. The
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Speaker 1: more stomage you have, the more carbon dioxide there is
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Speaker 1: in the air. Leaves developed these stomas, they can absorb
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Speaker 1: more C O two. Right, So if so facto, the
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Speaker 1: more stonage you have, the more c O two in
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Speaker 1: the atmosphere, and what they found by counting these stomas
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Speaker 1: was that there was a lot of c O two
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Speaker 1: prior to the forties in Europe. That means that there's
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Speaker 1: not that much c O two. You know that there
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Speaker 1: was a lot of c O two in the air
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Speaker 1: in the atmosphere. One reason there's a lot of CEO
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Speaker 1: two is because there's not a lot of trees to
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Speaker 1: soaked that CEO two up. One reason there's not a
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Speaker 1: lot of trees is because humans are cutting down the
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Speaker 1: trees to farm land, right or just stay warm. There's
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Speaker 1: there's fewer trees deforestation brought on by human activity. Okay,
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Speaker 1: So what they find then is that after fifty roughly,
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Speaker 1: there's suddenly fewer stomas, which means that there's less c
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Speaker 1: O two in the air, which means that there's more trees.
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Speaker 1: Do you know ei there are more trees? Do you
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Speaker 1: I have a good guess it's because in between that time,
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Speaker 1: the forties and the thirteen fifties, the Black Death happened
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Speaker 1: and so many people died that it had a measurable
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Speaker 1: effect on the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of
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Speaker 1: not that many trees and then suddenly lots of trees
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Speaker 1: because there was no one to tend this farm land
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Speaker 1: in the interesting you know what else, This was a
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Speaker 1: tidbit from the end. But money, as we'll say it here.
4:01
Speaker 1: They think that there is a lack of genetic diversity
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Speaker 1: in the UK today because of the Black Death, they
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Speaker 1: were much more genetically diverse than the eleventh century. It
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Speaker 1: represented what's called the population bottleneck. Million people died, about
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Speaker 1: a third of the population of Europe, which is mind boggling. Yeah,
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Speaker 1: it's all right, let's do it. Well, I was reading
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Speaker 1: this one his story in his name is Skip Knox,
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Speaker 1: and I don't know where he is now, but when
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Speaker 1: he wrote that it was at the university no Boise State,
4:30
Speaker 1: and he said, um, he goes it's uh, it's worth
4:33
Speaker 1: saying this has never happened before or since. It was
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Speaker 1: an event like this where within about to three years
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Speaker 1: million people died. That's never happened before. I mean, no
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Speaker 1: war can account for that, Yeah, no other pandemic. Yeah,
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Speaker 1: it's this is this was it. This was as bad
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Speaker 1: as it gets, and it was bad that it was bad,
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Speaker 1: and it was bad not is because of the ultimate devastation,
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Speaker 1: but it was bad because of how gnarly the black
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Speaker 1: death is. Yeah, why don't you want to talk about
5:07
Speaker 1: some symptoms? All right? If you had the Black death,
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Speaker 1: this is what you had to look forward to. First
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Speaker 1: of all, you had no idea what was happening to you.
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Speaker 1: Neither did your doctor, neither did your local cardinal or bishop.
5:21
Speaker 1: And you know, they didn't know a lot back then,
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Speaker 1: but they had their like cock eye theories. At least
5:25
Speaker 1: they didn't even have cock eye theories on this. They
5:28
Speaker 1: had a cock eyed theory that everybody went along with.
5:30
Speaker 1: They developed some but initially they're like, I don't know
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Speaker 1: what this is, but you have these big tumor lumps.
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Speaker 1: You got them on your body, you got black spots.
5:41
Speaker 1: Well tell them about the tumors somewhere small, but they
5:44
Speaker 1: could get pretty big. Yeah, some as big as an apple.
5:46
Speaker 1: And they said in the article here that if you
5:48
Speaker 1: had one on your neck, it could permanently like cock
5:51
Speaker 1: your head to one side, permanently, meaning like the five
5:54
Speaker 1: days you had. I know, I hope it's okay to
5:58
Speaker 1: laugh a little bit this now. And you surely know, um,
6:03
Speaker 1: you had plus using out of sores, open sores. You
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Speaker 1: had a nasty smell because you were riding from the
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Speaker 1: inside out. Your breath was awful, it was gruesome. Purple splotches.
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Speaker 1: God's tokens, right, Yeah, they call them God's tokens because
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Speaker 1: once you got these, that means God's gonna take you
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Speaker 1: off the earth pretty soon. That's God's token. Fevers that
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Speaker 1: could fry your brain, send you into delirium, vomiting, coughing
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Speaker 1: up blood, blood, and plus using I've already said it's
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Speaker 1: worth twice. So um, those are some of the symptoms.
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Speaker 1: And once you start having these symptoms, you are pretty
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Speaker 1: much done for within a matter of days. Right, and
6:47
Speaker 1: so in our modern day, it takes a little while
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Speaker 1: to bury somebody, even with this machinery that we used
6:54
Speaker 1: to to dig modern graves um, but back and it
7:00
Speaker 1: took even longer to dig a grave, to hold the
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Speaker 1: service to bury somebody. And when people die within days
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Speaker 1: and suddenly there was like a third of the population
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Speaker 1: dying off. There was no time to bury anybody, no space.
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Speaker 1: There's literally stacking up dogs, eating corpses. It saysn't here
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Speaker 1: children hungry ChIL babies beside their dead mothers. Yeah, Molly
7:23
Speaker 1: Edmans really when they wrote this man Um. Yes, but
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Speaker 1: that's the truth. I mean, that was crazy. That was
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Speaker 1: the raw truth. That was an ugly, ugly, ugly scene.
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Speaker 1: And of course anyone who see Monty Python knows that
7:35
Speaker 1: there are people who operated carts that banged on the pot.
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Speaker 1: Since I bring out your dead, yeah, and well we'll
7:42
Speaker 1: get into the flinging. Of course it is too. Well,
7:45
Speaker 1: let's get into the flinging because that's kind of how
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Speaker 1: it started. Um. And first I want to point out
7:50
Speaker 1: the Black Death, you know, gripped Europe. It did not
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Speaker 1: only impact Europe. It's so funny, it's so eurocentric the
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Speaker 1: way we approached the Black Death. It started in the
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Speaker 1: Gobi Desert sometime in the late thirteen twenties in China.
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Speaker 1: China lost thirty five million people in the fourteenth century
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Speaker 1: from the Black Death. You know, no one ever mentioned
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Speaker 1: They always hear about the Europe the Black Death in Europe,
8:16
Speaker 1: so it was localized and it was actually in in
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Speaker 1: Asia and Central Asia, um for a decade or two. Um.
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Speaker 1: But they blame it pretty squarely on the Genoese for
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Speaker 1: bringing it to Europe. Right, yes, how did the Genoese
8:31
Speaker 1: get it? Well? In thirteen seven in Kafa, which is
8:34
Speaker 1: modern day Ukraine. It was a Genoese trading post. They
8:38
Speaker 1: were attacked by the Tartar army. Uh. Tartars start to
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Speaker 1: die off by the plague, and the Genoese are like,
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Speaker 1: sweet God as punishing our enemies and they're dying, Let's
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Speaker 1: have a big party and celebrate. And then the Tartars
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Speaker 1: are like, well, we're gonna start flinging our dead corpses
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Speaker 1: over the wall at you because the smell is so awful.
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Speaker 1: You will die from the smell. They weren't two far.
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Speaker 1: It was a stupid idea, but stupid idea of what
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Speaker 1: at work, because they actually what they were doing. What
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Speaker 1: they were doing was germ warfare, very early germ warfare. Right.
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Speaker 1: They had it wrong though they thought it was a smell.
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Speaker 1: Actually it was this pestilence, and so the Genoese you know, said, oh,
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Speaker 1: we need to get rid of these nasty bodies. But
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Speaker 1: it was too late. They were infected by that point.
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Speaker 1: The Genoese fled to Sicily, and then from there it
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Speaker 1: took two pass one. Uh where was the first one?
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Speaker 1: The well? The first one went up through um Austria
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Speaker 1: and Germany, and then the second path went through Um
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Speaker 1: Italy to France to the UK. Yes, at a speed
9:39
Speaker 1: which doesn't sound fast, but it really is. If you're
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Speaker 1: talking about black death, about two and a half miles
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Speaker 1: a day. And not only is it fast like even
9:46
Speaker 1: by today's standards, this is before This is when people
9:49
Speaker 1: were riding horses and carts and the two a half
9:52
Speaker 1: says real, it's lightning fastest trained fast for that time. Yeah, yeah,
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Speaker 1: Why is it called the black death? Actually, do you
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Speaker 1: know this? I do, So there's a there's a mistranslation.
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Speaker 1: At some point, well back in the day, people called
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Speaker 1: that the big death or the great mortality, the big death,
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Speaker 1: that's bad. That's what they called it as it as
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Speaker 1: it was happening, right and then um later on it
10:16
Speaker 1: came to be known as the um ultra morse, which
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Speaker 1: is Latin for terrible death or black death. At some
10:26
Speaker 1: point in time, somebody decided that they liked the black
10:29
Speaker 1: death better. Uh, and sometime in the eighteenth century when
10:33
Speaker 1: they were using it to differentiate them Plague of London
10:38
Speaker 1: in sixteen sixty five, But they mistranslated. It wasn't originally
10:43
Speaker 1: called the black death or the um terrible death. It
10:47
Speaker 1: was called the Big Death. And then it just kind
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Speaker 1: of went from there all right. Well, at the time,
10:53
Speaker 1: King Philip the sixth of France turned it over to
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Speaker 1: the Paris College of Physicians, who were they were like
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Speaker 1: the Mayo Clinic of the time, and they said, here,
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Speaker 1: we need to figure out what this is. What is it?
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Speaker 1: Smartest doctors in the world, and they says, we know,
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Speaker 1: we figured it out. It's all here on the report.
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Speaker 1: This is uh, this happened when Saturn and Jupiter and
11:14
Speaker 1: Mars lined up in Aquarius and Jupiter's roll wet and hot,
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Speaker 1: and it soaked up the evil vapors from the Earth
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Speaker 1: and Mars is dry, so it exploded those vapors, and
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Speaker 1: now it is a fog of death. And they very
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Speaker 1: smugly pinpointed the time that it happened one pm on
11:31
Speaker 1: March and they just slicked their heads like but they
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Speaker 1: did say it was a fog of death. My guess
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Speaker 1: is that it was probably pretty foggy for some reason,
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Speaker 1: some weather system happened, or they were onto something like
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Speaker 1: it was being transmitted through the air somehow, which you know,
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Speaker 1: they might have been actually onto something there with an
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Speaker 1: airborne pathogen. Possibly. Instead they went with the fog of death.
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Speaker 1: From the planets aligning. And another term for a fog
12:01
Speaker 1: of death is a miasma. It's a corrupted bit of air.
12:05
Speaker 1: And this is what Europe went with, right, Yeah, like, okay,
12:10
Speaker 1: well these are the smartest guys as far as medicine goes.
12:12
Speaker 1: They have the longest crow'sbeak masks of anybody. Um, and
12:17
Speaker 1: we're gonna go with this fog of death thing, So
12:19
Speaker 1: how do we combat it? And what they figured out was, well,
12:22
Speaker 1: since you're breathing this fog, you got to keep the
12:25
Speaker 1: fog at bay. And one good way to do that
12:27
Speaker 1: is to fight fog with fire smoke. So there were
12:31
Speaker 1: fires everywhere. Yeah, they were recommended to burn um aromatic wood,
12:36
Speaker 1: so people would and people even carry this stuff around rosemary,
12:39
Speaker 1: amber and musk. The Pope even stood between two fires
12:43
Speaker 1: when he addressed people. Yeah, they kept them burning on
12:46
Speaker 1: the street corners. Um. And then there were the fact
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Speaker 1: that it was coming from the south and it was
12:53
Speaker 1: a fog of death. They started putting glass in their
12:58
Speaker 1: southern windows so that the southern wing couldn't penetrate it.
13:01
Speaker 1: See that kind of smart there it is. They weren't
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Speaker 1: all hokey. Now, some that seemed kind of smart. What
13:06
Speaker 1: didn't seem very smart was don't bathe don't have physical intimacy,
13:14
Speaker 1: although it's a good way to spread disease. So maybe
13:16
Speaker 1: they're onto something there. Um, don't sleep during the daytime,
13:19
Speaker 1: avoid sad thoughts to spreading it. They're like, just don't
13:23
Speaker 1: be lazy. Yeah, yeah, avoid sad thoughts about disease. There's
13:27
Speaker 1: something to that if you believe in the mind. Uh,
13:29
Speaker 1: if you believe in positive psychology exactly. So some of
13:33
Speaker 1: the little hokey there was a little substance to a
13:35
Speaker 1: bit of it. Um, I have a little cocktail tidbit
13:38
Speaker 1: for you, though, so awesome. I don't know. The word
13:42
Speaker 1: quarantine actually comes from the Black Death in Venice, Italy.
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Speaker 1: They were pretty smart and they said, you know what,
13:49
Speaker 1: we should start isolating some of these ships of people
13:51
Speaker 1: that are coming in, not let them come on land
13:53
Speaker 1: until we know that no one on board is is sick.
13:56
Speaker 1: So let's do this for like thirty days. And then
13:57
Speaker 1: they went, now that's not long enough. It's let's do
13:59
Speaker 1: it for four days, forty days or qua quaranti quarantine.
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Speaker 1: That's where the word came from. Well, it's not as
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Speaker 1: much of a stretch of somebody. Besides Chuck is pronouncing it.
14:14
Speaker 1: But yes, that is where quarantine. Look at it. It
14:17
Speaker 1: looks like they were quarantine. Yeah, so that's pretty smart too.
14:20
Speaker 1: There were some smart people. Still, six of the population
14:23
Speaker 1: of Venice died within I think eighteen months. Yeah, so
14:27
Speaker 1: the quarantine, while practical and useful, you know, didn't protect everybody. Yeah,
14:33
Speaker 1: and you know, we don't know what the doctors were
14:35
Speaker 1: doing that much because all we have here is just
14:38
Speaker 1: recorded documents of what was going on. Well there there
14:42
Speaker 1: there wasn't even documentation. It was popular writers, church writers.
14:46
Speaker 1: It wasn't like science journals. I mean, not a lot
14:48
Speaker 1: of people knew how to read and write during this time,
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Speaker 1: and the ones who did normally were affiliated with the church,
14:53
Speaker 1: so they would have had a very religious view of
14:56
Speaker 1: what was going on. Right. Um, they're probably blood letting
14:59
Speaker 1: the yeah, the like the physicians that were working the
15:02
Speaker 1: Crow's mass guys um were uh, blood letting. They were
15:07
Speaker 1: um opening up these bu bos, which is it's almost
15:11
Speaker 1: like a textual representation of a pussy boo. They would
15:17
Speaker 1: open these and drain them because that made sense to
15:20
Speaker 1: get rid of whatever is in there. I guess very smart. Yeah, Um,
15:25
Speaker 1: we still do that today, Poppins. It's yeah every Tuesday. Uh.
15:30
Speaker 1: Religion comes into play pretty heavily there because a lot
15:32
Speaker 1: of people said, you know, let's let's turn to God
15:35
Speaker 1: and pray for help. Well, a lot of people thought
15:38
Speaker 1: that this was punishment from God. Oh yeah, the flagellents,
15:42
Speaker 1: so only he could do anything about it or she
15:44
Speaker 1: depending in New York and um, so yes, the flagillents,
15:48
Speaker 1: chuck take it. The fligillents of Germany. Yeah, the Brotherhood
15:52
Speaker 1: of the flood Flagellents had our vigilance. Flagelence had already
15:56
Speaker 1: been around, not flagilens though, no very big difference. They're
16:00
Speaker 1: already around. But they rose up, like you said, in
16:02
Speaker 1: Germany the in the mid thirteen forties, and they thought
16:06
Speaker 1: it was punishment from God. And they thought, you know what,
16:07
Speaker 1: we're gonna do something about it. So you've heard of
16:09
Speaker 1: self flagellation, that's where it comes from. They would walk
16:11
Speaker 1: barefoot across Europe whipping themselves with their little whatever cat
16:16
Speaker 1: of nine tales. Uh, scourges, scourges like that had like
16:22
Speaker 1: sharp kind of barbed ends. Uh. It didn't work, though,
16:27
Speaker 1: and a lot of people turned against God because of that,
16:29
Speaker 1: they also killed a lot of Jews. The Flagellnce did
16:33
Speaker 1: a flagelence. Yeah, highly they killed Jews. They would kill
16:39
Speaker 1: clergy that opposed them, except for the Pope, and the
16:42
Speaker 1: Pope was like, you're officially denounced, and I think thirteen
16:45
Speaker 1: forty nine and that was it for the flagelence, although
16:48
Speaker 1: they popped up again in later um plugues and pestilences,
16:53
Speaker 1: but they stopped for the black death, like immediately when
16:57
Speaker 1: they denounced them. Well, they killed Jews because it was
17:00
Speaker 1: a pretty bad rumor going around that the Jews had
17:03
Speaker 1: uh were poisoning the water supply, and because at the
17:06
Speaker 1: time Christians and Jews lived separately, largely a lot of
17:09
Speaker 1: Jewish Jewish communities were effectively quarantined so they didn't get
17:14
Speaker 1: hit as hard. So all of a sudden, Jews are
17:17
Speaker 1: I don't know prosperings the right word, but they're not
17:19
Speaker 1: dying like the Christians are, so so that Christians started
17:23
Speaker 1: burning them as they started burning them alive. Apparently in Strasbourg,
17:28
Speaker 1: the Germany was more Jews died in Germany than anywhere
17:33
Speaker 1: else um at the hands of Christians who were upset
17:36
Speaker 1: about the plague um and in Strasburg in uh, let's see, um,
17:43
Speaker 1: I think thirteen forty eight, on one day, two Jews
17:46
Speaker 1: were burned alive at the stake, just that one city
17:49
Speaker 1: on that one day. And apparently entire communities used to
17:52
Speaker 1: be walled up and set on fire with everybody, or
17:55
Speaker 1: Jews would convert Christianity on the spot, or they would
17:58
Speaker 1: set their own houses on fire. Yeah, which is kind
18:01
Speaker 1: of sensible, like, oh, look, my house is already on fire.
18:04
Speaker 1: Better I should probably take off, keep on walking, see
18:07
Speaker 1: you guys later. Well, a lot of Jews fled to
18:10
Speaker 1: the countryside, didn't they too, because they were able to. Yeah,
18:13
Speaker 1: good for them, is what I said. Well, I don't
18:15
Speaker 1: think it was just Jews. I think anybody who had
18:17
Speaker 1: the means of going to the countryside, which is crazy
18:20
Speaker 1: because I mean, like going to the countryside means like
18:22
Speaker 1: stepping out your back door. I thought in like the
18:25
Speaker 1: fourteenth century, but apparently there were still the wealthy went
18:30
Speaker 1: out to the country once in a while, and they
18:31
Speaker 1: would Yeah. So it was needless to say, it was
18:35
Speaker 1: a really rough few years for Europe um and by
18:40
Speaker 1: fifty two it was largely gone. Yeah, it just took off.
18:46
Speaker 1: But what I mean there was. It's not like all right,
18:48
Speaker 1: black desk on, everything's cool now. They were like huge,
18:51
Speaker 1: huge effects. Apparently the um self flagellation worked, right, Yeah,
18:57
Speaker 1: sure that's what it was. Well, yeah, you have to
18:59
Speaker 1: imagine a third, right, So that means that between you,
19:03
Speaker 1: me and Jerry, one of us dies. That's not necessarily true.
19:09
Speaker 1: I'd set myself on fire. Um okay, so then two
19:14
Speaker 1: of us would have died, right, Um, I mean a third,
19:18
Speaker 1: a third of of this this population within like seriously,
19:24
Speaker 1: like two years is just gone. People are um being
19:29
Speaker 1: eaten by dogs or corpses are being eaten by dogs
19:32
Speaker 1: in the streets. Families are just completely abandoning one another
19:35
Speaker 1: once they get sick. The whole um social psyche, the
19:39
Speaker 1: collective psyche of Europe just kind of crumble a little bit.
19:42
Speaker 1: It took a pretty big ding. And one of the
19:45
Speaker 1: places it took that ding was in religion. A lot
19:48
Speaker 1: of heretical society sprung up because it was like either
19:52
Speaker 1: this was your work, God, or you didn't do anything
19:55
Speaker 1: to help us, so we're not coming to church anymore.
19:59
Speaker 1: Instead of being really thankful that they survived, people uh
20:03
Speaker 1: partied like it was basically crazy parties. Yeah, a lot
20:07
Speaker 1: of debauchery, lots of debauchery. Um. Uh. There was an
20:14
Speaker 1: economic impact to a huge one. Well yeah, if half
20:17
Speaker 1: your sorry, if a third of the workforce is gone,
20:21
Speaker 1: you've got no one working, So labor is gonna skyrocket.
20:24
Speaker 1: The price of labor is the price of labor is
20:27
Speaker 1: cost of goods food, you know, the little silver lining.
20:31
Speaker 1: Their food was in supply because there weren't as many
20:34
Speaker 1: people to eat it. Exactly. Sadly, the other cool thing
20:38
Speaker 1: does it's potentially we saw the birth of modern science
20:42
Speaker 1: and medicine because of the Black Death. Because the leaders
20:46
Speaker 1: we're like, you know, this whole planet's aligning thing was
20:50
Speaker 1: pretty stupid now that we look back at it, So
20:52
Speaker 1: why don't we found some schools and do some real
20:56
Speaker 1: research based on physical science and give that a whirl.
21:00
Speaker 1: And it started. It worked, which was some kind of
21:03
Speaker 1: ironic as well, because the population was so decimated that
21:06
Speaker 1: it even after they had this idea, they had to
21:09
Speaker 1: wait a little while to reopen schools because they couldn't
21:12
Speaker 1: staff them. Oh yeah, um. And also, chuck, there were
21:16
Speaker 1: there was an almost complete loss of any illusions about
21:20
Speaker 1: death and whether or not it's coming for you. Um,
21:23
Speaker 1: there's a whole allegory and art that um that sprang
21:28
Speaker 1: up at the time called Dance macab which is the
21:30
Speaker 1: dance of death, which is basically like you know, showing
21:34
Speaker 1: living people and skeletons, you know, working side by side
21:39
Speaker 1: or um hanging out or partying together or whatever. And
21:42
Speaker 1: the point of that is that you know, death can
21:44
Speaker 1: come at any time, and it's coming for everybody. So
21:47
Speaker 1: art and poetry and things like that just took a
21:49
Speaker 1: real down return there for a while because that was
21:52
Speaker 1: clearly what everyone was thinking about at the time. That's right, Chuck,
21:56
Speaker 1: Uh what caused it? See? This is where I get
21:59
Speaker 1: a little, um, a little confused, because there's conflicting information
22:03
Speaker 1: even to this day. Well it's um one of those
22:05
Speaker 1: things where we thought we figured it out, but uh,
22:08
Speaker 1: modern techniques and modern investigation have kind of led us
22:14
Speaker 1: to think, is you like that? I have have led
22:16
Speaker 1: us to think that maybe that first idea hasn't wasn't right.
22:20
Speaker 1: The first idea came out of the third pandemic, which
22:24
Speaker 1: was in eighteen nine in Hong Kong and India. Right, Um,
22:29
Speaker 1: and two bacteriologists Alexander Jerson and Uh Shibasaburo Kitasato, thanks Um.
22:38
Speaker 1: They worked independently and isolated the cause of that third pandemic,
22:43
Speaker 1: and it is what we know today as bubonic plague.
22:46
Speaker 1: It's a bacterium called your Cina pestis um, named after
22:51
Speaker 1: Alexander Jerson right um, and it it lives in the
22:55
Speaker 1: four gut of fleas, rodent fleas that feast on rat. Yeah,
23:00
Speaker 1: this was interesting, I thought, because the flea bites the
23:04
Speaker 1: regular fleet um bites rat and drinks blood, and it's like,
23:08
Speaker 1: oh man, that was fantastic. Uh. If you're infected with
23:14
Speaker 1: the your sena, you're sending a pestus and your fleet.
23:18
Speaker 1: You bite the rodent and you eat the blood, but
23:21
Speaker 1: it gets stuck in your foregut, and so you never
23:23
Speaker 1: feel that quench of that tasty, tasty blood in your
23:26
Speaker 1: stomach if your flee. So you keep biting more and
23:29
Speaker 1: more rodents and infecting more and more roes because you're,
23:33
Speaker 1: like we talked about with the fleas, regurgitating it back
23:35
Speaker 1: onto rodents, and all of a sudden you're killing all
23:38
Speaker 1: these rodents and then when there are no more rodents
23:40
Speaker 1: and the fleas will go to people. And so they
23:43
Speaker 1: thought that's how it was spread, which makes sense because
23:47
Speaker 1: it's not like um conditions were really sanitary in the
23:51
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, or there were plenty of rights before the
23:53
Speaker 1: Middle Ages. Um the fourteenth century, right, yeah, um, yeah,
23:58
Speaker 1: there were plenty of rats, plenty of fleas um. The
24:01
Speaker 1: problem is that there's a lot of discrepancies between bubonic
24:06
Speaker 1: plague or your sena, your Cinea pestis and whatever. The
24:10
Speaker 1: Black Death was right, so you've got like a big discrepancies.
24:14
Speaker 1: You've got um bubos right with both, but bubo is
24:19
Speaker 1: under the bubonic plague. Um tend to spring up around
24:23
Speaker 1: the growing area only, And descriptions of bubos with the
24:26
Speaker 1: Black Death or that they were all over the place,
24:29
Speaker 1: all over your body. Um bubos or bubonic plague doesn't
24:33
Speaker 1: cause um purple splotches. It doesn't cause delirium, doesn't yeah,
24:40
Speaker 1: Or the vomiting um, blood and and pus and all
24:44
Speaker 1: that stuff. There's a lot of stuff that was documented
24:47
Speaker 1: widely by different sources during the Black Death that doesn't
24:51
Speaker 1: have anything in common with bubonic plague. Well, the big
24:53
Speaker 1: one to me was the fact that bubonic plague, even
24:57
Speaker 1: if you don't treat it as mortality rate of about
25:01
Speaker 1: and from the sounds of the Black Death, it was,
25:04
Speaker 1: you know, near a hundred taken down entire villages, right,
25:08
Speaker 1: So they did figure out that the third pandemic in
25:12
Speaker 1: was caused by your cinea pestis bubonic plague, but they
25:17
Speaker 1: erroneously possibly attributed it to the Black Death. But for
25:22
Speaker 1: about a hundred years, that was the premise that everyone
25:25
Speaker 1: went on was bubonic plague was a Black Death until
25:29
Speaker 1: and some researchers who have been dubbed um plague deniers. Yeah,
25:35
Speaker 1: I have started to come up with competing theories, and
25:37
Speaker 1: there's there's some interesting ones. Yes, sociologists Susan Scott and
25:41
Speaker 1: biologist Christopher Duncan. I think that it is a hemorrhagic
25:45
Speaker 1: fever like ebola. Makes sense. Some say anthrax or maybe
25:52
Speaker 1: some just disease that is not around, some extinct disease, right,
25:55
Speaker 1: like it went extinct somehow after after the Black Death.
25:59
Speaker 1: The thing though, is the DNA study and the nineteen
26:02
Speaker 1: nineties they dug up some corpses from mass graves in
26:05
Speaker 1: France tested the teeth because I guess dental pulps about
26:09
Speaker 1: the only thing you contest at that point, and they
26:11
Speaker 1: did find that the y pestis in the samples. So
26:15
Speaker 1: they said, oh, yeah, so it was a plague. But
26:17
Speaker 1: then they apparently looked at other bodies from other grave
26:20
Speaker 1: sites and that it wasn't conclusive, so they didn't find
26:24
Speaker 1: it at all. So what does that mean? I don't know.
26:29
Speaker 1: What do you think? Um? Well, Skip Knox, that historian
26:33
Speaker 1: are referred to earlier. His um his theory is that
26:37
Speaker 1: it was bubonic plague working in concert with the mnemonic plague,
26:43
Speaker 1: so it was respiratory, which is um bubo pneumonic. Yeah,
26:48
Speaker 1: which basically his ideas that there are two plagues working
26:50
Speaker 1: at once, or that's the theory he subscribed to, which
26:54
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's it seems likely to me that
26:56
Speaker 1: there's probably some bacterium that's either extinct or worse than
27:01
Speaker 1: that dormant right right, Let's hope it's dormants. Not the
27:04
Speaker 1: word I want to be hearing right now. Oh, and
27:06
Speaker 1: there's one other thing that was a problem with the fleas.
27:10
Speaker 1: There were two other problems that we didn't mention. One
27:12
Speaker 1: was that there should have been a die off of rats,
27:15
Speaker 1: because remember they jumped from rats to humans when there's
27:17
Speaker 1: no more rats and there's no documented die off of
27:20
Speaker 1: rats in Europe before the plague ever um. And then secondly, um,
27:27
Speaker 1: what was the winter should kill fleas? That's right, Chuck,
27:30
Speaker 1: but it didn't. Well, it does kill fleas, but it
27:33
Speaker 1: didn't have any effect on the spread of the Black Death. Well.
27:37
Speaker 1: The other problem though, is it's like we said, it's
27:39
Speaker 1: all the stuff that's written down, so it's not like,
27:43
Speaker 1: you know, you said the bubos are near the groin area.
27:46
Speaker 1: But at the time, you know, with the sensationalism of
27:50
Speaker 1: of the day, people they could have been writing, you know,
27:52
Speaker 1: the sores all over their body, and you know, they
27:55
Speaker 1: could have exaggerated some of the symptoms because of fear. Uh. Yeah,
28:00
Speaker 1: I just don't know how much I trust the records
28:02
Speaker 1: of hundreds in Europe. Well. Plus also, there was no
28:04
Speaker 1: standardized medical jargon either for them to use or that
28:09
Speaker 1: that they could use that we would understand. Yeah, so
28:12
Speaker 1: we're cobbling together what we think they meant, what this
28:14
Speaker 1: one person meant. But they think the numbers of deaths
28:18
Speaker 1: are pretty accurate. This is pretty crazy. One third. Oh,
28:24
Speaker 1: and we're talking about how it's so eurocentric. In Cairo,
28:28
Speaker 1: seven thousand deaths a day at its peak, the black death.
28:34
Speaker 1: Sorry the black death. Wow. Yeah, let's say for black death.
28:38
Speaker 1: If you want to see some pretty cool pictures, um
28:41
Speaker 1: and read more about it, I strongly recommend this one.
28:44
Speaker 1: Type in black death in the search bar at how
28:47
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. And it's time now for a
28:50
Speaker 1: listener mail. Josh. I'm gonna call this our second Mafia mail.
28:57
Speaker 1: Sometimes we get so much mail from one topic that
29:00
Speaker 1: we feel like we should read more than one email
29:02
Speaker 1: on the topic, especially when it's accompanied by physical threats.
29:06
Speaker 1: That's right. So this is from Kate the Canucks Stewart,
29:10
Speaker 1: that's what she calls herself, which I thought it was
29:12
Speaker 1: kind of funny. Hi, Josh and Chuck and Jerry. I'm
29:15
Speaker 1: a huge fan of the podcast, but I've never written
29:18
Speaker 1: in before because I never had much to say besides
29:20
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, I love you guys. It's a great
29:23
Speaker 1: reason right in by the way. Um, However, after listening
29:27
Speaker 1: to the Mafia Cast, it just had to write you
29:29
Speaker 1: an email to have some info from my family's past.
29:32
Speaker 1: My grandmother on my mother's side, it's a second cousin
29:36
Speaker 1: to the infamous Lucky Luciano. Most of the men and
29:40
Speaker 1: her family were made and although she was largely kept
29:43
Speaker 1: out of the loop when it came to the wheelings
29:45
Speaker 1: and underdealings of her family. Like Diane Keaton and the
29:49
Speaker 1: god fine Uh. There is one event that really brought
29:52
Speaker 1: home the kinds of things her brother and cousins were
29:55
Speaker 1: up to. When my mom was only a baby, my
29:57
Speaker 1: grandfather ran out on my grandma. When my great uncle
30:01
Speaker 1: heard about this, he and his cousins asked my grandma
30:03
Speaker 1: if she wanted them to take care of him for her.
30:07
Speaker 1: She really didn't know what that meant, but responded, maybe
30:09
Speaker 1: even jokingly, well, don't kill him or anything. The next day,
30:13
Speaker 1: she got a phone call that her husband had been
30:15
Speaker 1: admitted to a hospital, badly beaten, with both of his
30:18
Speaker 1: legs broken. Clearly, it wasn't prudent to mess around with
30:22
Speaker 1: members of my family. There are other rumors swirling around
30:25
Speaker 1: about different ventures that my great uncle and cousins were
30:27
Speaker 1: involved in, but they were notoriously tight lipped about everything.
30:31
Speaker 1: As far as I know, no one in my family
30:33
Speaker 1: is a part of the mob anymore, and no one
30:35
Speaker 1: has the broken legs. No one has broken the legs
30:37
Speaker 1: of any of my ex boyfriends. But I wouldn't date
30:42
Speaker 1: you just to be on the safe. That huh. That
30:45
Speaker 1: is Kate the canuck Um. Thanks a lot, Kate appreciate that,
30:49
Speaker 1: and all you Canucks listening out there, thank you very
30:52
Speaker 1: much for moral this and thousands of other topics. Is
30:58
Speaker 1: it how stuffworks dot com? So and more about the
31:00
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31:03
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