Many people know that the Black Death was once terrifying. In the Middle Ages, before modern medicine existed, the Black Death claimed hundreds of millions of lives and lost as many as half of the population in many countries. The Black Death changed history completely. Some say that without the Black Death, there might not have been a Renaissance. How to understand the inference that the Black Death "ended" the Middle Ages? How exactly did the Black Death change human history? In the microbiologist Joshua M. In S. Loomis's pen, he combs through the major impact of the Black Death in the Middle Ages on human history. The following is an excerpt from the book Infectious Diseases and Human History, authorized by the publisher.
The original author | [Beauty] Joshua S. Loomis
Excerpts | Xu Yuedong
Infectious Diseases and Human History, Joshua M. By S. Loomis, translated by Ke Li et al., Social Sciences Academic Press, May 2021.
Some of the most devastating and influential epidemics in human history (outbreaks) are caused by deadly diseases known as plague. The epidemic is widespread and is said to have claimed 200 million lives in its approximately 1,500-year history. It wiped out as many as half of the population of some countries and convinced many that the end of the world was imminent. Of the three major plague epidemics on record, the one that swept across Eurasia in the mid-14th century was by far the most extensive and historically significant. Because of the terrible symptoms at the time of illness, the disease is also known as the Black Death. It spread throughout Eurasia, taking away nearly half of the continent's population. The loss of so many lives plunged Europe into political, economic, and cultural chaos that lasted for decades after the worst of the disease passed. Surprisingly, some of the consequences of the Black Death are still affecting modern people some 650 years later.
The causative agent of plague is a small bacterium, Yersinia pestis, which enters the body through two channels. The first, and possibly the most well-known, is through the bite of an infected rat flea. When fleas bite mice or other rodents infected with Y. pestis, the bacteria enter the intestines of fleas and begin to multiply in large numbers. An infected fleas bites a human, sucks human blood, and its stomach is filled with bacteria and blood, and it spits out a portion of its internal organs onto the human skin. When a person scratches the place where the bite is bitten, there will be a tiny wound, and the bacteria will pass through the wound through the skin and reach the body fluids.
Once inside the human body, bacteria quickly enter the local lymph nodes, where they can replicate in large quantities without restraint, even if immune cells are present. The growth of bacteria in the lymph nodes can lead to inflammation and tissue death, and eventually to swollen and dark lymph nodes (a common symptom of necrotic tissue). The swelling and necrosis of the lymph nodes is called lymphadenitis, and the consequences of its formation are called lymphadenopathy. Bacteria usually spill into the bloodstream to multiply, causing inflammation throughout the body. This systemic infection, known as septic plague, causes shock, tissue necrosis of the extremities, and a mortality rate of up to 90%. The bacteria, through an interconnected vascular system, eventually enter the lungs, triggering a deadly pneumonia known as pneumonic plague. Invasion of the lungs is an important step in the pathogenesis of plague, because it can be passed on to other human hosts by coughing, allowing others to inhale infected respiratory droplets. Although fleas are often the vector for plague into new populations, in large-scale epidemics such as the Black Death, pneumonia caused by the disease is a major factor in high transmission rates and mortality rates.
The Justinian plague hindered the heavy responsibility of the Roman Empire?
In 540 AD, during the reign of Justinian I of the Byzantine Empire, The Justinian Plague broke out for the first time. Genetic analysis suggests that the plague may have originated somewhere in Asia and spread rapidly to the Middle East, North Africa, and much of Europe. Like the Black Death that followed, the first outbreak of plague caused destruction and panic where it spread. Tens of millions of people have died on three continents, and millions more have suffered from high fever and lymph node necrosis. It is said that in some places, no one survived within a few weeks. Although it preceded the development of modern transportation and massive urbanization, the plague remains one of the worst epidemics of humanity ever.
The place hardest hit by justinian plague was Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Roman Empire split into the Eastern and Western Roman Empires in 330 AD, and Constantinople quickly became one of the most important cities in Europe. It was a small, densely populated coastal city and a major trading port for merchants from Asia, North Africa and Europe. Every day, ships come from all over the world, carrying all kinds of cargo, and occasionally smuggled rats. In 541 AD, a ship from Egypt unfortunately carried a rat infected with the deadly Yersenis Y. pestis bacillus.
Just a few months after arriving in Constantinople, the plague spread in this crowded city, claiming countless lives. Eyewitness accounts at the time suggested that tens of thousands of people died every day, so many that survivors were forced to tear down the roofs of churches and towers to house dead bodies. Although the first and most powerful infectious disease eventually ended in 550 AD, the plague afflicted humanity for the next 200 years until it finally subsided in 750 AD. In total, justinian plague claimed about 40% of the lives of People in Constantinople, and worldwide, between 25 million and 100 million people died.
Many people died early in the outbreak of this infectious disease, which had a profound impact on the balance of power in Eurasia. Especially when Constantinople was trying to consolidate power and regain the lost territory of former Rome, the plague severely weakened Constantinople's rule. In the 4th century, the Roman Empire expanded rapidly, and Constantine the Great administratively divided the land into two parts– the western half was ruled by a Roman emperor, and the eastern half was controlled by a co-emperor in Constantinople.
After the split, the east experienced expansion and prosperity, while the west gradually weakened. Some Germanic peoples (such as the Goths and Vandals) began to invade large areas of the Western Dynasty, and in 476, Rome fell. Without half the western half of the land, the eastern part of the former Roman Empire (which later became the Byzantine Empire) gained greater autonomy. As a result, Constantinople became a veritable center of trade, culture, and power throughout Europe. When Justinian I ascended to power in 527, one of his goals was to raise an army to regain lost lands in the west and revive the Roman Empire in its former glory.
Justinian I first sent his army to North Africa to drive out the Vandals who occupied the area in the 5th century. In 534, the army soon achieved a series of decisive victories. Justinian I had his Byzantine army move north to Western Europe in an attempt to retake the Mediterranean from the Goths. The battle lasted 5 years and bled into blood, and in the end Justinian I was victorious, driving out most of the Gothic army. As a result, most of the land of pre-Rome came under Byzantine rule, and Justinian I seemed to be about to usher in a new era of empire. Unfortunately, in 540, the deadly plague came a few months later, killing a large number of farmers, soldiers and craftsmen.
The plague greatly weakened productivity and Greatly weakened Justinian I's ability to defend the newly conquered lands, feed soldiers, and pay off foreign debts. Everything he had just acquired could be wiped out, and Justinian I had to hire foreign soldiers to re-enrich his army. He also began to use stronger force to tax his subjects, even though the populace was already suffering from the deadly plague. Naturally, this behavior provoked considerable resentment among the population, who expressed dissatisfaction with his waste of resources on unnecessary military forces.
Justinian I (center)
Over the next 25 years, the Byzantine Empire managed to maintain control of Italy, Spain, and North Africa, but soon after the death of Justinian I in 565, almost all of its land was gradually taken back. In addition, later generations witnessed the rise of the Persian and Arab empires and gradually encroached on more land in the Byzantine Empire, and finally the Byzantine Empire had little land left. The plague had a negative impact on the economy, military, and psychology of the Byzantine Empire, which was no longer able to defend its territory. Hundreds of years later, the Roman/Byzantine Empire almost ceased to exist.
No one knows what Europe, Asia, and Africa would have looked like without the plague of the 6th century. It would be too simplistic to think that the reunified Roman Empire could maintain control of its previously lost lands despite constant attacks from foreign invaders. In the 5th century, the western part of the empire disintegrated for a series of reasons (such as land decay, food shortages, political infighting, etc.), many of which remained unchanged 100 years later. Imagine, however, what would a mighty Roman Empire have been like in the face of the rise of Islam, the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the British Isles, and the intrusion of various Germanic tribes.
The Black Death became the root cause of the decline and revolution of feudalism in Europe?
The introduction of the plague to Europe in 1347 caused a sharp decline in the population of Europe, and in just a few years, the economy of much of Europe changed dramatically. Due to the massive famine in northern Europe in 1315, Europe fell into recession 30 years before the Outbreak of the Black Death. Millions of peasants died of hunger and disease, ending the explosive population growth of the previous centuries. Later, the climate gradually stabilized and improved, and the harvest improved, but the losses caused by famine irreversibly corroded people's souls. People show an ugly side, and murder, rape, abandonment of children, and even human flesh are not uncommon. At the same time, the relationship between the feudal lords who managed the land and the peasants who cultivated the land became tense.
Feudalism was a hierarchical system that organized the population and had existed throughout medieval Europe since the 9th century. It is a hierarchical relationship born under the land management system. At the top of the feudal system was the king, who owned all the land in his country. The king divided a part of the land among the nobles/lords, who had to be loyal to the king and protect the king. The lords in turn gave a small portion of the land to the knights in exchange for their military protection. The knights then hired a large group of serfs/peasants to cultivate the land, and they paid rent to the knights, exchanging their hard work for personal protection, food, and shelter. Much of the money generated from running these self-sufficient estates ended up being given to the king in the form of taxes. Much of the burden in this system is on peasant laborers, who have little opportunity to move upward and improve their socioeconomic status.
The impact on feudalism triggered by the Great Famine of 1315 reached its peak during the Black Death. All strata of feudal society were affected, and there were vacancies in the management of the land and, more importantly, the labourers who cultivated the land. With a large number of crops not harvested and much of the labor force lost, the surviving farmers can now fight for greater freedom and higher incomes (up to 5 times their previous incomes). Knights and lords, as usual, had to perform their duties for the king, and they were forced to obey, and more and more wealth eventually fell into the hands of the commoners.
Joshua M. S. Loomis
The response of local governments in some countries to this upward mobility has been through the enactment of laws that limit workers' salaries and raise the cost of renting land. The new middle-class laborers were very dissatisfied with this, and many responded by rebelling against those in power (e.g., the peasant revolt of 1381). Labor revolts continued in many parts of Europe, and many laborers moved to towns in search of better opportunities. The economy gradually shifted from agriculture to industrial production and trade, which deprived feudal lords and knights of their right to rule over the lower classes. In the following years, most European countries began to turn to capitalist economic systems, and feudalism would disappear forever. Although the Black Death was clearly not the only reason for the decline of the feudal system, it was indeed an important factor in the decline of the feudal system.
The Black Death dealt an unprecedented blow to the medieval church?
In modern society, whenever a new disease is discovered, scientists and doctors will quickly gather in the epidemic area, collect patient samples, and then use a series of diagnostic tools to determine the cause of the disease. Once the microbial pathogen is identified, infected patients can be treated appropriately and other people will be guided on how to prevent further spread of the disease. Disease outbreaks usually subside and people can recover in a short period of time.
When the Black Death raged, the people living in the 14th century did not yet have modern technology available. Therefore, their explanations for the causes of infectious diseases are often based on superstition and fear, rather than reason. They want someone or something to be the scapegoat so they can get rid of any involvement in themselves that "causes" the epidemic. Some believe that natural phenomena such as earthquakes or comets brought the plague to Earth, or that the arrangement of the planets caused the disaster. The most widely circulated explanation for the coming of the plague is God's punishment of human sins. De Musi clearly stated this belief when describing the Mongol army's siege of the city of Kaffa: "Heaven shot arrows into the earth like a rain, and shot out the pride of the Tatars. The Mongols tried to disprove the Christian Italians, and God used the Black Death as a weapon to stop them.
God's punishment of the unrighteous was meaningful until the plague inexplicably turned its anger to christians themselves. People came to the church to seek God's instructions, and priests gave their flocks instructions for repentance and prevention of disease. People prayed, held religious ceremonies, placed crosses on the pillars, and made pilgrimages to the shrines of the saints. Some even appease God with more extreme forms of confession, with people known as "whippers" shuttling through villages, whipping themselves with chains and nailed whips until they bleed. They would lead public parades, punishing themselves in the procession, trying to personally bear God's punishment for humanity (as people think Jesus did). In fact, the whippers did not stop the plague, but accelerated its spread, because infected fleas followed them through the streets. Thus, despite all sorts of measures of repentance and atonement, devout Christians and their clergy are dying at an unprecedented rate.
Because clergy play an important role in caring for the sick, they have a high mortality rate during the plague. One contemporary observer wrote: "None of the Austin dervishes in Avignon have survived... In Magrona, only 7 out of 160 monks survived... In Marseille, none of the Franciscan monks survived to tell the story. If God does not even care for the priests He has chosen, what does it mean for the vast majority of other beings? To many, it seems like God gave up on humanity and nothing can alleviate His anger. In William Langland's poem, "Now God is deaf, cannot hear our voices, and prayer is powerless to stop the plague." "The common reaction was to lose trust in the church and therefore the number of people who left the church was record.
In the long run, the impact of the plague on the Catholic Church was equally disastrous. First and possibly most importantly, the massive reduction in clergy has led to vacancies in high-level church personnel. In order to fill the vacancy quickly, churches had to lower standards and hire clergy who were less educated, less dedicated, and less trained than their predecessors. The result has been an increase in abuse of power and corruption within the Church. The reformer Martin Luther exposed an abuse of power that was more common over the next century: the sale of indulgences. A certificate of redemption is a form of atonement to make up for sins that have already been forgiven by God. In general, repentance can be long prayers, fasting, providing services, or helping the poor. However, some corrupt clergy began to use these indulgences as a way to extort large sums of money from parishioners, with the idea that they would immediately pay for their sins or risk going to purgatory. Understandably, many in the church were disgusted by this corrupt and other abuses by the clergy after the plague.
Martin Luther
The clergy did not save the populace from the plague, and with the corruption that followed, some historians believe that the Black Death indirectly fueled the Protestant Reformation. Although the Reformation was initiated by a complex interplay of factors, before Martin Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses, it was impossible to deny the unique role of the plague in significantly weakening the power and authority of the Catholic Church.
The Black Death also ushered in a new era of anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews. People are desperate to find someone to blame for their suffering, and the Jews become the perfect scapegoat. This is not only because their beliefs and customs are very different from those of Christians, but also because they tend to live their lives separately from others. When the Black Death struck unexpectedly in 1347, many Christians began to suspect that this unusual, isolated group of outliers had spread the disease. As Christian mortality rates climbed, that suspicion rose to blame, which eventually turned violent.
The persecution began in the spring of 1348 near Narbonne, France, where a group of Jews was gathered and burned to death. Shortly thereafter, Jews in Western Europe were publicly identified as poisoning Christians in wells, lakes and rivers. After the Jews were arrested, people tortured them in various forms to force them to confess their sins. There is a particularly vivid account in The Confession of Agimet the Jew of Geneva (October 1348) that Agme, a Jew, who lived in Geneva, was arrested at Châtel, where he was punished, was later released, and a long time later, tortured again, he confessed in front of many credible people... Agme came to Venice with a bag full of poison, and then sprinkled some of the poison on the well or cistern next to the Germanic mansion, trying to poison the people who came to the cistern to drink. So, after being arrested twice and tortured, Agme "voluntarily" admitted that he had thrown some unknown mixture of venom and poison into the Venetian water supply system. Although this was an obvious coercion, such news and other secret poisoning news spread among European towns almost as fast as the Black Death itself.
The public response to these suspected poisonings has been intense. Jews were rounded up everywhere (often on the orders of visiting whippers) and burned to death or killed by swords. In some cities, all the Jews were wiped out within a few days. For example, one day in August 1349, Christians killed 6,000 Jews in a single day in Mainz, Germany. Massacres of similar magnitude also occurred in Italy, France, Belgium, Switzerland and most European countries.
At the height of these massacres, Pope Clement IV was verified with the author and should be Clement VI. Attempting to stop popular violence, a decree was used to protect the Jews: "It does not seem credible to blame the Jews for everything ... For the almost universal plague, together with God's secret judgment, has tormented and continues to torment the Jews themselves, as well as other peoples around the world who have nothing to do with the Jews. Unfortunately, the rule of the Catholic Church was in extreme chaos at the time, with two popes claiming to be the true successors of St. Peter. In the end, the clergy's attempts to stop the killings were largely ignored, while local mobs continued the killings unhindered for decades. No one knows the exact death toll of the 14th-century Massacre, but conservative estimates also number tens of thousands.
How did the Black Death spark a revolution in medicine?
In the years leading up to the Black Death, medicine was more of a philosophy than a clinical science. The medical theory education received by physicians is basically derived from the ancient teachings of hippocrates and Galen in ancient times. Most courses are not based on systematic knowledge of human anatomy and physiology gained through dissection or examination of clinical data, but on 1,000 years ago of knowledge of the disease, without any experimental evidence. Physicians know how fluid imbalances cause disease, and how the disease is spread through polluted air known as miasma. They often give patients with symptoms bloodletting, leech treatment, special recipes, or fresh air therapy.
When the Black Death arrived in the 14th century, Black Death specialists were recruited to treat the sick in the community and record the number of deaths from the Black Death. Plague doctors, dressed in elaborate clothing and sometimes bird-beaked masks filled with fragrant flowers (to ward off miasma), visit patients daily and perform the same bloodletting and leech therapy they have been using for centuries. Unfortunately, no matter what they do, the plague is only getting worse and worse. A man named Marchione di Coppo Stefani recorded the apparent helplessness of physicians at the time: "Almost none of the patients survived the fourth day. Neither the physician nor the drug is useful. Maybe the disease is unprecedented, or maybe the internist has never studied the disease, and they seem incurable. No one knows what to do, that's the scary thing. "Physicians, like the clergy, couldn't do anything about the plague, and people began to lose faith in them.
Bird beak type mask
Although the etiology of plague is not understood, some treatments and precautions do help to some extent. For example, it is advisable to leave the city in search of "fresh air" and avoid the "miasma" that causes illness. While the foul-smelling air is clearly not the source of the disease, the idea of fleeing the city has allowed some to flee those who spread the plague. Unfortunately, only the rich have the ability to leave the city and flee to safety. Another effective measure to slow the spread of the disease is to isolate people on board for 40 days at the port when the vessel arrives. By doing so, it is hoped that the infectious crew will have an outbreak during the isolation phase before disembarkation so that the crew will not be infected with other people after disembarking. Interestingly, the Black Death was the first time in human history that isolation was used to slow down the spread of the disease (the word "quarantine" means 40 days in Italian). This initiative has most likely saved countless lives in epidemics of plague or other pathogens.
The fact that physicians and medieval medicine failed to stop the spread of the Black Death triggered a major change in the pharmaceutical industry. Diseases make people feel desperately that physicians need better training, and the profession generally needs stricter regulation. Most healthcare providers at the time were uneducated, licensed, and regulated. Few have some form of schooling, and even fewer have received practical training from experienced practitioners. After the plague, many cities began to issue laws requiring medical practitioners to produce proof of training and education before practicing medicine in society.
Moreover, medical schools across Europe began to include more anatomy courses in the medical system, and some schools opened new courses using updated medical textbooks. The plague has also led to significant improvements in the way practitioners share what they have learned while treating patients. Many physicians publish their practical experience as a written medical paper, a bit like today's medical journals. Others gather information from colleagues to form manuals for prevention, treatment, and surgery. In short, the Black Death helped medicine out of the Dark Ages, from the ancient philosopher-led medicine to a more rational and evidence-based era.
What effect did the Black Death have on medieval art?
A common misconception about the Black Death is that its high mortality and utter destruction helped usher in a new era of horror art with themes of disease, death, and destruction. Indeed, there are many such images of plague, but at the height of the plague outbreak (1347-1351) and later, most of the works of art in Western Europe actually present more pictures of hope, salvation, and piety. In addition, historians believe that the decades before 1347 were the era when medieval Europe was obsessed with expressing themes of death and morality. Works such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Buonamico Buffalmacco's triumph of Death clearly show that early 14th-century people had begun to express new insights into death and the afterlife in their art.
This transformation owes much to a shift in Catholic theology (according to the papal edict issued by Pope Benedict XII in 1336), with greater emphasis on the soul, the afterlife, and purgatory. Thus, a few years later, the Black Death that struck Europe deepened, rather than opening up the view of death that already existed in European culture at the time. Its influence is far-reaching and enduring, as images of despair and great hope will permeate European art throughout the Renaissance.
In the art of the Black Death, it is common to paint the victims at different stages of their death, with others, saints or angels trying to help them. For example, Lieferinxe's St. Sebastian Intercedes during the Plague in Pavia depicts the martyr St. Sebastian Praying to God on behalf of the victims of the Black Death, and at the bottom of the painting we can clearly see that the victims are experiencing painful struggles. Interestingly, it shows both the hope that a righteous God can end the suffering of the people and the great suffering and despair of those who are still affected by the disease. Examples such as Tintoretto's Saint Roch Curing the Plague and the famous Illustrations of the Black Death in the Toggenburg Bible all use the same style, while others tend to focus more on God's judgment and wrath. The latter's artistic expression is more typical of arrows shooting from heaven to earth, or death wielding a sword or scythe at humans.
Other common artistic themes that emerged during the Black Death focused on the actions of the whippers and the persecution of Jews. As mentioned earlier, the floggers march and the Holocaust were public scenes that were fairly common throughout Western Europe for many years. Both have experienced great suffering, have strong religious overtones, and are ideal artistic themes. Particularly vivid descriptions of the whiplash are from a medieval manuscript, "The Procession of the Flagellants" in the Belles Heures. Several masked men brutally whipp two kneeling men, while others carry crosses to the parade. As for the Holocaust of the Jews, many of the paintings depict a huge sea of fire devouring a group of people with distorted faces, and onlookers throwing wood into the flames or showing a satisfied look.
Perhaps the most enduring metaphor in the art of the Black Death is collectively known as the Dance of Death. Most of the Paintings of the Dance of Death depict corpses or skeletons of different social classes dancing (or moving uglyly), trying to show that the Black Death treated all people equally. The movements of the dance mimic the writhing and twitching movements of muscles caused by necrosis and severe pain in the body of a patient with black death in the late stages of the disease. A typical example of this style is Bernt Notke's painting in 1466, which is aptly titled Danse Macabre, and in one fragment of this painting it is clearly seen that death plays music while other forms of death dance happily, clinging to the pope and the emperor, leading them to their ultimate destiny. In the centuries following the peak of the Black Death outbreak, similar paintings appeared in many countries of Western Europe. This amply illustrates that the psychological harm caused by infectious diseases lasted for a long time after the middle of the 14th century.
The Black Death became the cause of human evolution?
When an infectious disease breaks out in a certain population, some individuals in the population who have a genetic mutation have a stronger natural resistance to the infection. Once exposed to pathogens, this group of people is more likely to survive than normal, non-mutated counterparts. If an infectious disease is particularly severe or prolonged (such as the Black Death), a large number of susceptible people will die, leaving the survivors to reproduce in their societies. After many generations of "survival of the fittest," the new population that survived carried the mutated gene much more frequently than the group that carried the mutated gene before the onset of infectious diseases. Genetically, they are better able to withstand diseases that can make a comeback at any time. Thus, infectious diseases are a selection mechanism that triggers changes in the genetic structure of a population over a period of time, in other words, it can promote human evolution.
Over the past 20 years, there have been many inferences about whether the Black Death of the 14th century had an important impact on human evolution. This question is difficult to answer because the Black Death pandemic occurred nearly 650 years before humans invented genetic testing. Therefore, we must retrospectively analyze the bones and tooth fragments of those known to have died of the Black Death. The DNA, although partially decomposed due to time, can still be compared with the DNA of existing populations (descendants of survivors) to see if there are more frequent genetic mutations after the Black Death. In other words, comparing the DNA of people who died of the Black Death with those who survived allowed us to identify mutations that might have provided some people with natural resistance to Y. pestis infections in the 14th century.
These studies clearly show that plague helps trigger permanent changes in the human immune system. On the surface of our immune cells, there is a series of proteins called Toll like receptors (TLRs), which can detect the infection of germs and trigger an inflammatory response. Genetic analysis of different populations of people who survived the Black Death revealed similar mutations in their TLR genes. The emergence of unique TLR gene sequence changes strengthened the inflammatory response of humans to the invasion of Y. pestis, giving the 14th century a stronger ability to defeat bacterial infections than the state before the mutation. In medieval times, these inflammatory-prone changes helped humans, who were often bombarded with pathogenic bacteria, and they were a problem for people living in relatively hygienic environments in the 21st century. For example, clinical data suggest that people with this TLR gene mutation are more likely to develop autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's disease. So, the genetic mutations that helped our ancestors survive the worst infectious disease in human history, in part, give us the chaotic immune response today.
Many studies have also focused on a genetic mutation called CCR5, because it has been found that this mutation called CCR5 Δ32 is present in 15% to 20% of Europeans, but is almost absent in people of African and East Asian descent. This model is interesting because the Black Death ravaged much of Europe, but did not affect sub-Saharan Africa or East Asia. Mutations in the CCR5 Δ32 gene and coincidence in the areas where the Black Death occurs may represent this mutation that helped 14th-century Europeans fend off the Black Death. They survived and bred protected (genetically mutated) offspring. As non-mutants die at a faster rate, the frequency of this mutation in the population increases. As a result, 15 to 20 percent of Europeans today have this mutated gene, and they may be the descendants of the survivors of the Black Death.
Y. pestis diagram
If the above inference is correct, then animals with the CCR5 Δ32 mutation gene should theoretically be more capable of fending off Y. pestis Yersinia than the average animal. However, the findings are not always true. Experiments seem to have shown that this mutation has an effect on large rats against Y. pestis, but not on small mice. Due to the contradictory findings, we cannot conclude whether the Black Death was a precipitating factor for mutations in the CCR5 Δ32 gene in European populations, or whether the mutation originated from other diseases such as smallpox. Interestingly and coincidentally, mutations in CCR5 Δ32 can affect the replication of another deadly pathogen, HIV. We know that HIV could not have been the original cause of this unique pattern of genetic mutations, as it has only affected humans for 40 years (two generations).
The 19th-century plague outbreak raised nationalism against the British Empire?
Without mentioning the third pandemic that broke out in China in the 1850s, a discussion of the plague and its impact on all of humanity would be incomplete. Over the next 100 years, a third pandemic claimed the lives of 12 million to 15 million people. Unlike the previous two, the third pandemic was mainly in Asia, not Europe, transmitted mainly by rats, and had a low mortality rate. One of the reasons for the reduction in mortality is related to the combination of isolation measures and other prevention and control measures.
In addition, microbiology was already well developed in the 19th century, and the pathogen of plague was discovered in 1894 (discovered by Dr. Alexander Yersin). In 1897, humans developed and vaccinated the basic plague vaccine, and in 1898 deciphered the role of fleas in the process of transmission. An interesting addition to the vaccine is that the scientist who developed it is Waldemar Haffkine, who is so confident in his development that he first tested the vaccine's effectiveness on himself. After he himself did not die of live plague bacteria, he conducted the next round of experiments on Indian prisoners. Despite ethical issues and only partial protection, the success of the vaccine has greatly slowed the spread of the plague in Asia and reduced its destructive power.
An important and long-term effect of the third plague outbreak was that it further worsened relations between the British Empire and the peoples of the areas it ruled, especially the people of India. In order to control the spread of the plague in India, the British Army and the Regional Special Committee for Plague Control have taken a series of very strict measures against the population. These include mandatory isolation of suspected cases, confiscation and destruction of "infected" objects, evacuation of populations, and abandonment of traditional treatments. It is conceivable that people who have been suffering under British tyranny for decades will not comply with increasingly stringent epidemic prevention measures. This has led to more and more protests and acts of violence.
A very famous event occurred in 1897, which reflected rising tensions, in which three brothers, Walter Rand, Damodar Hari, Balkrishna Hari and Vasudeo Hari, three of Rand's vicious British chiefs, namely Walter Rand, ambushed his carriage on his way home from the Queen's Diamond Celebration and brutally killed Rand and his army guards. The three brothers were soon arrested, convicted, and hanged. The story was quickly published in the international media, drawing attention to the plight of the unstable Indian subcontinent. Although India did not gain independence for the next 50 years, the 19th-century plague outbreak raised their nationalism against the British Empire and lasted for many years.
Edited | Luodong
The introductory part of the proofreader | Lucy