BLACK DEATH PLAGUE

The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe
and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from
the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. People gathered on the docks were met
with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were
gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. Sicilian authorities hastily
ordered the fleet of “death ships” out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years,
the Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europe—almost one-third of the
continent’s population.

Even before the “death ships” pulled into port at Messina, many Europeans had heard
rumors about a “Great Pestilence” that was carving a deadly path across the trade routes of the
Near and Far East. Indeed, in the early 1340s, the disease had struck China, India,
Persia, Syria and Egypt. The plague is thought to have originated in Asia over 2,000 years ago
and was likely spread by trading ships, though recent research has indicated the pathogen
responsible for the Black Death may have existed in Europe as early as 3000 B.C.

Europeans were scarcely equipped for the horrible reality of the Black Death. “In men and
women alike,” the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio wrote, “at the beginning of the malady,
certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits…waxed to the bigness of a common
apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-
boils.”

Blood and pus seeped out of these strange swellings, which were followed by a host of other
unpleasant symptoms—fever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible aches and pains—and then, in
short order, death. The Bubonic Plague attacks the lymphatic system, causing swelling in the
lymph nodes. If untreated, the infection can spread to the blood or lungs.The Black Death was
terrifyingly, indiscriminately contagious: “the mere touching of the clothes,” wrote Boccaccio,
“appeared to itself to communicate the malady to the toucher.” The disease was also terrifyingly
efficient. People who were perfectly healthy when they went to bed at night could be dead by
morning.

Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a
bacillus called Yersinia pestis. (The French biologist Alexandre Yersin discovered this germ at
the end of the 19th century.). They know that the bacillus travels from person to person through
the air, as well as through the bite of infected fleas and rats. Both of these pests could be found
almost everywhere in medieval Europe, but they were particularly at home aboard ships of all
kinds—which is how the deadly plague made its way through one European port city after
another.

Not long after it struck Messina, the Black Death spread to the port of Marseilles in France
and the port of Tunis in North Africa. Then it reached Rome and Florence, two cities at the
center of an elaborate web of trade routes. By the middle of 1348, the Black Death had struck
Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and London. Today, this grim sequence of events is terrifying but
comprehensible. In the middle of the 14th century, however, there seemed to be no rational
explanation for it.

No one knew exactly how the Black Death was transmitted from one patient to another, and
no one knew how to prevent or treat it. According to one doctor, for example, “instantaneous
death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy
person standing near and looking at the sick.”Physicians relied on crude and unsophisticated
techniques such as bloodletting and boil-lancing (practices that were dangerous as well as
unsanitary) and superstitious practices such as burning aromatic herbs and bathing in rosewater
or vinegar.

Meanwhile, in a panic, healthy people did all they could to avoid the sick. Doctors refused to
see patients; priests refused to administer last rites; and shopkeepers closed their stores. Many
people fled the cities for the countryside, but even there they could not escape the disease: It
affected cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens as well as people. In fact, so many sheep died that
one of the consequences of the Black Death was a European wool shortage. And many people,
desperate to save themselves, even abandoned their sick and dying loved ones. “Thus doing,”
Boccaccio wrote, “each thought to secure immunity for himself.”

The plague never really ended and it returned with a vengeance years later. But officials in
the port city of Ragusa were able to slow its spread by keeping arriving sailors in isolation until it
was clear they were not carrying the disease—creating social distancing that relied on isolation
to slow the spread of the disease.

The Black Death epidemic had run its course by the early 1350s, but the plague reappeared
every few generations for centuries. Modern sanitation and public-health practices have greatly
mitigated the impact of the disease but have not eliminated it. While antibiotics are available to
treat the Black Death, according to The World Health Organization, there are still 1,000 to 3,000
cases of plague every year.

1. What does the passage mainly talk about?