Ring Around The Bubonic Plague

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The majority of people will never read a children’s nursery rhyme and think that this rhyme is telling about a deadly disease that killed millions of people. “Ring around the Rosy”, the nursery rhyme, first appeared around 1347, and many scholars say that the rhyme was written to describe the symptoms of bubonic plague. The lyrics of “Ring around the Rosy” parallel the symptoms of one of the deadliest diseases of all time. The “ring around the rosy” refers to the round, red rash that is the first symptom of the disease and “Pocket full of posies” refers to the practice of placing flowers in the pocket of an infected person. “Ashes, Ashes” is said to mimic the sound of a person sneezing and “we all fall down” describes the great number of …show more content…

Many years later, researchers used the terms Black Plague and Black Death to describe bubonic plague because of the black boils that appear on the bodies of the infected. The bubonic plague or “the Pestilence”, as it was known in the early years of the outbreak, is caused by the bacterium Yersina pestis, which lives in the bloodstream of rats. The bacterium is passed to humans by the bite of fleas that feed on the sick rats and then from the site of the fleabite, the bacterium drains into a lymph node causing the node to swell and form painful buboes, which most often appear in the groin, on the thigh, in an armpit or on the neck. The disease incubates for 3 to 5 days before the person falls ill and another 3 to 5 days before, in the majority of cases, the victim dies. High fever, aching limbs, and fatigue mark the early stage of the disease, but the next stage of the disease advances rapidly to the stage which includes infected lymph nodes that swell and turn black, hence the name black plague. The victim begins to vomit blood and, in some instances, suffer hysteria from fever and terror and dies shortly after the lymph nodes swell until they burst within the body. By the time the initial carrier of the disease dies, several individuals will be in the early stage of the disease.

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