Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Black Death Science Cold Encyclopedia

At the beginning of 2020, a new type of coronavirus pneumonia, centered on Wuhan, Hubei Province, began to spread rapidly. This highly contagious disease is not only fierce, but also has a high fatality rate if it cannot be treated in time. In the face of the epidemic, China's governments at all levels have effectively controlled the disease through strict prevention and control plans and treatment measures, avoiding large-scale transmission.

In the middle of the 14th century, when medicine was not yet developed, people in Europe were not so lucky. A plague called the "Black Death" raged wildly on the European continent at the time, claiming nearly 25 million lives, which is nearly a third of Europe's total population.

The Black Death, one of the most terrible infectious diseases in history, as the name suggests, is the appearance of many dark spots on the skin of patients. The cause of the disease is due to a plague fungus that resides in rodents and is transmitted from highly viable rats to fleas and parasitized in humans. In addition to being infected by direct contact with mice, the pathogen also spreads from person to person in the respiratory tract.

The virus first originated in Central Asia and later spread to Europe due to the maritime trade of Asian and European merchants. Since European society was in the "dark" medieval period at that time, the general public basically did not take a few baths in their lifetime, and the only sewage system on the street was a stinky ditch, which undoubtedly became an excellent place for the rapid spread of germs.

It hung over all of Europe like a devil, and for those infected with the disease, painful death was almost inevitable, except that the speed of transmission was so fast that the onset of the virus until death took only three days at most. Weakly, medical technology in Europe was extremely scarce and backward, and doctors could only do bloodletting.

People gathered in the center of the church to pray for the forgiveness of the gods, and desperate people marched in the streets and even whipped themselves with whips, praying that the Creator would not spread death again. The gathering was undoubtedly even worse, countless poor people and even nuns, priests were infected one after another, all methods could not resist the ravages of the disease, and the desperate people began to look for those responsible. They blamed the spread and death of disease on Jews, pagans, and lepers, and carried out arrests, imprisonment, and even mass murders against them... Life and death, the grass and people's lives, the social order was completely destroyed by this sudden catastrophe, and the whole of Europe seems to be making the last struggle before its demise.

However, in 1352, the Black Death itself disappeared.

According to modern scientists, the disappearance of the Black Death is due to the rapid killing of the host by the virus, the large number of personnel reduced to solve the risk of dense cross-infection of the crowd, and its chain of infection is gradually interrupted... The Black Death epidemic that ravaged the European continent has thus unconsciously faded from people's vision. The nightmare of the Black Death did not end completely, and for the next three hundred years, the Black Death still made a comeback from time to time, but Europeans at that time realized that isolation could effectively avoid the spread of the virus.

After the disaster, people who lived the rest of their lives gradually became suspicious of the theoretical basis of religion. The shadow of death brought about by the Black Death had a huge impact on people's ideas and concepts, they thought deeply about the meaning of life, people's beliefs began to disintegrate, began to advocate the freedom of timely pleasure, attached importance to the life of individuals and the joys of reality, they no longer suppressed their desires, and left the theological precepts behind.

The fear of the Black Death broke through the church's afterlife and asceticism, and people cherished the present and cherished life even more. This laid a solid foundation for the ensuing Renaissance movement...