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The spread of the black plague history essay
Traedy of the bubonic plague
Bubonic plague history
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A deadly disease that has a history for pandemics has nicknames of “Black Death or Black Plague”(BubonicPlague1). The plague is an infectious disease that is caused by Bacterium Yersinia Pestis.
Yersinia Pestis gets passed around by rodents and then to fleas and then to humans. The fleas bite the rodents, that are infected with this bacteria, and once Yersinia Pestis is internalized the bacteria will start to multiply. The bacteria in the flea gets so big that, when the flea tries to feed on the human, it stops any blood from going in to the fleas stomach cavity. Instead of the blood going through the Yersinia Pestis comes out and into the human being. Therefor “a single gene was likely responsible for the death of about 25 million people during the plague pandemics of the Middle Ages”(BubonicPlague8). All of this is the causes that started the plague. There’s only one other way that the plague can be passed on and its if the Yersinia Pestis gets into the human beings lungs. Then that human being can pass it on to another human being by then coughing and sneezing. This form can only happen because there are three forms of the plague.
The three forms of the plague all have a different levels of seriousness and symptoms. Forms of the plague are bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemia plague. Out of all three of the plagues, the bubonic plague is the most common and the other two are more fatal. Bubonic plague is the result of a fleabite and is caused by swollen. The symptoms for the bubonic plague is lymph glands. The lymph glands are also called buboes, which are very painful. Other symptoms are shivering, vomiting, fever, muscles aches, intolerance to light, weakness, pus in armpit, pus on groin, white coding on tongue, and also h...
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...pe. And that’s only Europe. There were many other cases of small brake outs and also the third pandemic. This pandemic killed about twenty percent to fifty percent of the population. It is said that this changed the course of history.
All that has been said is that there are three different forms of the plague and three main pandemics that happen over the history. Although they did not know everything we know about the plague now a days, it still effects our history and in that history it effected family and friends.
Work Cited
“Black Deaths Pandemics.” World of Health. Gale, 2007. Student Resource in context.
Web. 19. Mar. 2014
“Bubonic Plague.” World of scientific Discovery. Gale, 2007. Student Resource in
context. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.
“Plague” UXL Encyclopedia of science. U*X*L, 2007. Student resources in context.
Web. 19 Mar. 2014.
The Black Death (also called the "plague" or the "pestilence", the bacteria that causes it is Yersinia Pestis) was a devastating pandemic causing the death of over one-third of Europe's population in its major wave of 1348-1349. Yersinia Pestis had two major strains: the first, the Bubonic form, was carried by fleas on rodents and caused swelling of the lymph nodes, or "buboes", and lesions under the skin, with a fifty-percent mortality rate; the second, the pneumonic form, was airborne after the bacteria had mutated and caused fluids to build up in the lungs and other areas, causing suffocation and a seventy-percent mortality rate.
The Black Death, also known as the Bubonic Plague is perhaps the greatest and horrifying tragedies to have ever happened to humanity. The Plague was ferocious and had such a gruesome where people would die in such a morbid fashion that today we are obsessed with this subject.
The Black Death, also known as the Black Plague and Bubonic Plague, was a catastrophic plague that started out in Asia and began to spread into Europe. In the span of three years, the Black Death killed about one third of all the people in Europe. The plague started out in the Gobi Dessert in Mongolia during the 1320’s. From the desert the plague began to spread outwards in all directions. China was among the first to suffer from the plague in the early 1330s before the plague hit Europe.
During the thirteenth century the plague started spreading, it spread through the trade routes of many countries. Many people only heard of the plague being in China, but little did they know that the infection was already following the routes. The were three types of the Black Death Bubonic, Pneumonic, and Septicemic.The Bubonic strain of the plague was more common, an infected person would have symptoms of chills, fever, vomiting, and rapid heartbeat. The person would soon develop inflamed swelling which were called buboes. Once a person had these buboes within a week, fifty to eighty percent of these infected
(SIP-A) The plague had many ways in spreading its disease making more and more people get sick very rapidly (STEWE-1) .The plague killed roughly half of the population of Europe, In crowded areas people could receive the Plague from fleas that had bitten wild black rats. Once transferred from flea to human it became fatal in days. (S3 27). (STEWE-2) In 1347 many sailors that were dying from the plague were on Italian merchant ships from the Black Sea, which is on the trade route between Europe and China. Within days the sailors on the ship had spread the plague from the port cities to the surrounding countryside, within a year the disease spread as far as England. (S14). (SIP-B) Because of the rapidly spreading disease the mortality rate and decrease of population was very high and greatly affected those who survived. (STEWE-1) Over half of the population had died and extremely quickly, there were so many bodies that there was no more room to bury them, the brutal depopulation is almost unimaginable for those who lived through such a painful time. (S1
1. The contrast between Cottard and the other characters is that while everyone else is in constant fear of catching the plague and doing everything they can to fight the disease, Cottard is cheerful in the fact that the plague has put a stop to the police investigating his mysterious crime . Cottard probably also enjoys the camaraderie of everyone else finally being in the same position as he is.
The Black Plague is an Oriental Plague marked by inflammatory boils and tumors of the glands. Such break outs were found in no other febrile disease ( Hecker, pg 2). Inflammatory boils often appeared and black spots which indicated decomposition of the body ultimately appeared on the skin. Another symptom of the plague were imposthumes opening with a discharge of offensive matter ( Hecker, pg 5).
Even though the bubonic plague can not be transmitted among humans, it was the most common of the three plagues. The bubonic plague occurs when fleas feed on the blood of infected rodents, which are usually rats (Poland 1). The bacterium that causes the infection is known as Yersenia Pestis. The fleas then pass the bacteria when they bite a human or when materials infected with Yersenia pestis directly enters the body through a wound. The names of this plague come from the swellings, also known as buboes, that appeared on a victim’s neck, armpits, or groin (Gottfried,1).The lymph nodes suddenly become painful and swollen with pus especially in the groin. Later, the skin splits and oozes pus and blood. Blood also comes out of the victim’s urine which, like the rest of the symptoms, smells horribly. These swellings (also known as tumors) could be as small as an egg or as big as an apple. Even though some people survived this disease, others would have a life expectancy of a week.
Pandemics, once started, are expected to spread worldwide. They cannot be stopped from spreading, once they outbreak, they continuously spread. The Black Death was a disease that spread throughout the Mediterranean and Europe. There were approximately 25 million deaths in Europe alone. The Black Death was caused by the bacterium called Yersinia Pestis during the 13th century. The Black Death, also known as the Bubonic Plague was caused by a single contamination of one person. The Black Death was caused by a single bacterium, overcrowding in areas like Europe, which effected a huge part of the population by simply killing it off.
The Black Death came in 3 forms: the bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic. Each different from of the plague killed people in a vicious way. All forms were caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis.
The plague was spread by fleas, which were not effected by the disease. Fleas first infected the rats, which lived off garbage and sewage. The rats then spread the infection to the humans. Rats were a common sight in the cities, due to the poor sanitary conditions, so no one suspected them (www.tartans.com). In the winter the plague seemed to disappear, but only because fleas were dormant then. Each spring, the plague attacked again, killing new victims (www.byu.edu). The effects of the plague were devastating. After just five years, twenty-five million people were dead - one third of Europe's population. Once people were infected they infected others very rapidly. As a result, in order to avoid the disease, many fled to the countryside where the lower population density helped to decrease the speed at which the disease spread (www.tartans.com). From a person's time of infection to his or her death was less than one week (www.home.nycap.rr.com). The plague became known as "The Black Death" because of the discoloration of the skin and black enlarged lymph nodes that appeared on the second day of contracting the disease. The term "The Black Death" was not invented until after 1800. Contemporaries called it "the pestilence" (Cantor 7).
It has been called “the greatest catastrophe ever.” That statement was made in reference to the Black Death which was one of many bubonic plague epidemics. Throughout history, the bubonic plague proved itself to be an extremely lethal disease. Outbreaks of the bubonic plague were devastating because of the stunning number of deaths in each of the populations it reached. The Black Death was the worst epidemic and disaster of the bubonic plague in all of history. The Black Death refers to a period of several years in which affected populations were decimated. The bubonic plague is a disease started by bacteria. The disease has horrible symptoms, and most of the victims die after getting the plague. The bubonic plague spread easily between different areas of people. The Black Death was not the first epidemic of the bubonic plague; there was another outbreak several hundred years before. It is important to understand the history of the bubonic plague and reflect upon the Black Death because plague outbreaks can still occur today.
The Black Death is now known to be spread by a flea. However, this flea was not the cause as it was the bacterium which lay in the stomach of the flea. This bacterium’s scientific name is Yersinia pestis. The main host of the flea is a rat, scientifically called Rattus rattus. Humans caught the disease because when the rats bred rapidly, it would lead to a population invasion. When the rat died, the flea would have to find another warm-blooded host to feed on, and next to them are humans. The flea bites the human and infects them. The unhygienic living conditions in the Middle Ages led to a faster spread of the disease, as a result creating a better environment for rats to live in. The lack of knowledge in the fourteenth century led to even worse remedies.
The plague is believed to have originated from central Asia in 1331, when the wild rats moved to live around the people, probably due to flooding and earthquakes. From central Asia, the plague spread to China and India before moving west to Iran. By 1345, the disease had spread along the trading routes to Europe. It is thought that Italian trading ships that were at Caffa also brought the plague to Constantinople, the capital of Turkey, and then to Eastern and Western Europe. The plague was then spread from person to person by bad hygiene and because the sick and dying weren’t isolated from the rest of the world. It affected more people in cities that in rural areas. This is because people in cities people are in closer proximity to each other than people in rural areas, so the germs have more people to get to than in the...
The Bubonic Plague, otherwise known as the Black Death, is a raging disease. Most people think of it as the physical Grim Reaper of their town or community. The disease lasted about six years, 1347 to 1352. The Bubonic Plague was a travesty that has traveled throughout Europe and has raged and decimated both large and small towns, putting Europe through a lot. The disease spreads through a bacteria called Yersinia Pestis.