Plague is a malignant infectious disease caused by some strongly pathogenic microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses. From ancient times to the present, human beings have suffered countless plagues: SARS, plague, smallpox, influenza, cholera, malaria and so on. The history of human evolution is, in a sense, a history of constant struggle against disease. In fact, this protracted war is still continuing, and may even accompany the human species. There have been plagues throughout history that have not only caused the death of large numbers of people, but have also had a profound impact on the course of human history.
The great plague in the ancient Greek city of Athens in 430 BC caused Athens to lose 25% of its population. The plague in the city of Rome in 164 AD caused an average mortality rate of 7%-10%. The Black Death that swept across Europe in the 14th century claimed the lives of 25 million people, when more than a third of Europe's population died. The smallpox virus brought to the Americas by European colonists plunged the population of the Americas by nearly 95 percent in a single century. The "Spanish flu" of 1918 caused more than 1 billion infections and more than 25-50 million deaths worldwide in just two years.
The year 1500 AD is generally used as the dividing point of world history: before this, world history was mainly the history of the independent development of various civilizations, and only after this did it truly form a global history of unity. Before 1500 AD, Chinese civilization, Islamic civilization, and European civilization were all developed independently, and the Americas and Oceania had not yet been discovered by people living in the Old World. It was the geographical discoveries of the 15th century that brought together the history of the world that developed alone in the past into a global history of unity.
In fact, the great geographical discoveries of the 15th century were, in part, one of a series of chain reactions caused by the Black Death in the 14th century. The "Black Death" is actually a term that has not been used until modern times. When the disease ravaged Europe, people directly called it "the great plague", "the great death", and "the great catastrophe". Some of the accounts of the characteristics of the Black Death at that time were descriptions of lymphadenopathy, which was similar to the lymphatic plague that occurred in Asia in the 19th century, so many scientists and historians believe that the Black Death in the 14th century may have been a plague.
Of course, there are some people who have different views on whether the Black Death is the plague or not, but here we will consider the Black Death as a plague according to the mainstream view of the current academic community. Plague is a disease caused by a bacterium called Y. pestis: these bacteria that parasitize animal hosts such as black rats and marmots can be transmitted to humans or other animals through fleas on rodents as a vector. Plague is thought to have first appeared in Central Asia and later spread to China and the Middle East through Silk Road trade.
However, Europeans had never been exposed to plague until the 14th century, so they had no resistance to this disease that had never been experienced before. In 1346 AD, the Mongol army attacked the Black Sea port city of Kaffa (present-day Ukrainian city of Feodosia) and used a trebuchet to throw the bodies of people killed by the plague into the city. At that time, a Genoese caravan in the city fled back to their hometown, the Republic of Genoa in Italy, just before the Mongols broke the city. When the Genoese were complacent about escaping the slaughter of the Mongols, they did not realize that they had brought death back.
In fact, these Genoese were probably infected with the plague when they were in Kaffa City, but they were still in the incubation period and did not realize this. A great plague spread clockwise throughout Europe with the city of Kaffa as its center: the Black Death spread to the port city of Messina in southern Sicily in September 1347, to Genoa in northern Italy and to the French Mediterranean port city of Marseille in November. In January 1348, the Black Death was introduced to Venice and Pisa, and in March of the same year it was introduced to Florence, a major industrial and cultural town in the heart of Italy.
The plague then spread from northern Italy via the Brenner Pass to Tyrol, Kernten, Styria, Vienna, and other places. In France, the Black Death swept through the entire country from Provence to Normandy, starting with Marseille. The Black Death broke out in the summer of 1348 in the port of Dorset, England, and in August of the same year the Black Death spread to london, the capital of England, and the entire Isle of Britain fell the following year. In early 1349, the Black Death crossed the Rhine from northeastern France to Germany, and then turned to Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and other places, until it finally came to Russia in 1352-1353.
At the height of the epidemic in 1348, florence, Venice, and London, the death toll in Europe's major european cities was more than 100,000. The Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio wrote in his work Decameron: "This plague is too terrible. Healthy people contract diseases as soon as they come into contact with a sick person. It burned as easily as dry wood on a raging fire. No, the situation is even worse than that: don't say that approaching the patient, that is, talking to the patient will lead to fatal diseases, and even if you have touched the clothes worn by the patient and touched things, you will immediately become sick."
Under the conditions of medical technology at that time, suffering from the Black Death almost meant being sentenced to death. Black Death patients will have obvious subcutaneous bleeding, and finally the whole body will grow black blood spots and die, so this terrible disease is called "Black Death". Pedestrians suddenly fall to their deaths as they walk on the street; people who stay at home die alone, no one knows until the smell of corpses is smelled; large numbers of corpses are transported outside the city every hour every day; cows wander the streets of the city without seeing anyone... All this was a real scene that was happening in Europe at that time.
The Black Death directly claimed the lives of 25 million Europeans (1/3 of the total population of Europe at that time), and the famine and war caused by the epidemic caused a total of 50 million people. The large-scale outbreak of the Black Death was closely related to the dirty and chaotic environment in Europe at that time: the medium of the Black Death was rodents and fleas, and these animals preferred the dark and dirty environment. Since the establishment of cities, the troubles of garbage have followed. Ancient China had a long awareness of cleaning up garbage.
In the Tang Dynasty, Chang'an City specialized in cleaning up garbage and feces, and in the Ming Dynasty, Beijing City already had sewage drainage pipes. The Roman Empire in the West also built complex underground drainage systems, but the urban construction of medieval Europe was much more regressive than in Roman times. Although the Germanic barbarians conquered the former territories of the Roman Empire by force, the Germans were far behind the Romans in terms of urban construction. The environment of medieval European cities was basically similar to that of India today.
At that time, open toilets could be seen everywhere in European cities, and even more so, there were not a few people who defecated directly and on the ground. The underground drainage system of the Roman era has long been abandoned, so all kinds of household garbage are piled up everywhere. Rats and fleas can be found everywhere in this dirty environment, and medieval Europeans did not like to bathe, so almost everyone had fleas on them at that time. Medieval Europe is known as the Dark Ages: a period in which technology, culture, medical care, and urban construction in Europe were in great retreat compared to those of The Romans.
At that time, Europe was almost entirely illiterate except for the church clergy, and the products created by a blacksmith shop in the village were high-tech products at that time. At that time, the conventional method of treating diseases by European doctors was bloodletting therapy, but this treatment had no effect on the Black Death. Desperate people have to hope for an all-knowing and all-powerful God, but no amount of prayer has been able to alleviate the spread of the epidemic. Over time people began to question God.
As the whole of Europe was ravaged by the Black Death, God did not intervene to save His people. This could not but confuse the Christian Europeans of the time. In order to divert people's attention, the church blamed the plague on the so-called infidels, Jews and Muslims. During the Black Death, Europeans staged round after round of religious massacres against Jews and Muslims. However, the Black Death in human history did not completely leave a lot of suffering, in fact, the Black Death profoundly affected the historical process of human civilization.
It was the Black Death that facilitated the development of isolation treatment systems in the history of modern medicine: people were forced to start isolating measures when traditional treatments did not work. In 1348, when the Black Death spread to the northern Italian city of Milan, the local archbishop ordered the quarantine of the three houses where the outbreak was first detected: a wall was built around it, and no one inside was allowed to take half a step, and the people outside had to leave only by leaving the door with necessities such as food. Later many cities adopted quarantine measures similar to those in Milan.
Usually, patients are isolated in their own homes, but there are also some places where they have committed some extreme behavior: banishing patients to the wilderness to fend for themselves, and even burying patients alive to avoid spreading to others... Such extreme cases did exist objectively at the time, but even then it was not a common phenomenon. More people are still isolated at home: they will be provided with necessities such as food, but patients are not allowed to step out of the house for half a step. Houses inhabited by segregated people are marked with a large "P" character.
This is to warn and remind passers-by that there are black death patients living in this house, so be careful and quick to avoid it. Through this tight isolation measure, the spread of fleas carrying Y. pestis between municipalities was greatly reduced, so the risk of the Black Death transmitted to humans through rodents and fleas was reduced. Of course, the isolation measures at that time also objectively caused a negative effect on the stigmatization of patients. Quarantine measures in Europe in the 14th century were not absolutely correct, but they were a key experiment in promoting modern medical isolation for human beings.
The more severe the quarantine, the lower the risk of the spread of plague in areas. Milan, the first to quarantine, became the "lucky city" with the least losses during the years when the Black Death ravaged Europe. In the centuries since, the fight against plague through quarantine has gradually become commonplace in the Mediterranean world, and the negative lessons of the 14th century quarantine system have been learned to make the quarantine system more formal. The Black Death, while promoting the development of the modern medical isolation treatment system, also indirectly became one of the triggers for the geographical discovery of the 15th century.
The ravages of the Black Death shattered people's superstitions about God. Some people gradually realize that praying to God all day long will not save themselves, so in the end their fate is still in their own hands. A humanistic trend of thought that emphasizes human subjective initiative began to become increasingly popular in Europe. It was this humanistic trend of thought that led to the birth of the Renaissance, which marked Europe's transition from the obscure and backward Middle Ages to the modern era of rich and powerful civilization. The Italian writer Boccaccio, mentioned above during the black death, was one of the representatives of humanist writers.
Humanistic thought swept away the old ideas of the past in the minds of Europeans, and since then Europe has undergone profound changes in politics, economy, culture, religion, science and technology. People have a stronger and stronger spirit of adventure in exploring the unknown world after breaking through the shackles of stereotypes. From about 1500 AD onwards, Europeans began to explore two aspects: on the one hand, the geographical exploration of the unknown New World by Dias, da Gama, Columbus, Magellan and others; on the other hand, the exploration of the unknown world by Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo and others in the field of natural science.
The Black Death was thus seen as an opportunity for the transformation and development of European society, but when Europeans sailed to the New World, they had not yet found a real way to defeat the Black Death. The final end of the Black Death was not so much the eradication of the plague as the disappearance of the path of the plague's spread. The Black Death began to stabilize after a ravage that killed more than one-third of Europe's population: a large number of people were burned, countless villages were deinhabilitated, and those who survived were basically quarantined and re-armed with antibodies.
In this situation, the Black Death was finally able to temporarily subside. Why is it a temporary stop? For more than three centuries the plague still made a comeback in Europe from time to time: in the corner of England alone, the plague broke out in 1563, 1593, 1625, and 1665. The plague of 1563 alone killed 20,000 Londoners, so much so that Queen Elizabeth I had to flee the capital London with her courtiers. When the plague made a comeback in Europe, China, located at the eastern tip of the Eurasian continent, gradually became the hardest hit area of the plague.
The intertwining of natural and man-made disasters in the last years of the Ming Dynasty finally triggered a large-scale plague. According to local chronicles in Shanxi, Hebei and other places, the plague broke out in Xingxian County, Shanxi in the sixth year of Chongzhen, and gradually spread since then. By the fourteenth year of Chongzhen, the plague had spread to Damingfu and Shuntianfu in Hebei, and the plague continued until the seventeenth year of Chongzhen. During the eleven years of the spread of the plague, the local chronicle records that "the plague killed most of the people and killed each other." The plague spread to Beijing in the 16th year of Chongzhen: the number of deaths in Beijing reached tens of thousands of people every day in April of that year.
According to statistics, the plague caused more than 200,000 deaths in Beijing, and there were only 80 to 1 million people in Beijing at that time. The situation in the local area was no more optimistic than in the capital: according to the local chronicles at that time, "In the 14th year of Chongzhen, the plague in Daming Province began to spread, and people died 56 out of 10, and the age was fierce." There was a great famine in Quang Binh Province, and people couldnibalism. The Great Plague of Beijing, the Great Plague of Tianjin. The epidemic in Henan Province, Yangwu County, Kaifeng Province, died nineteen, and countless exterminated people. Rongyang, the people die without separating the household, and the March Road is unoccupied. "Doctors at that time used the traditional typhoid method to treat the plague, but it was still ineffective.
In this case, Wu Yousheng from Wu County, Jiangsu Province, carefully studied and summarized the disease and put forward a new set of understandings: Wu Yousheng distinguished the temperature epidemic from the general external infection disease from the etiology and distinguished it from typhoid fever. Wu Yousheng broke through the traditional view that the six qi cause diseases and put forward a new view of infectious disease pathogens. His views have now been confirmed by modern medicine and microbiology. Since a new cause has been summarized, it is also necessary to create a new treatment method: Wu Yousheng has studied the lancet method to treat patients, which has achieved relatively good results.
In 1793, plague broke out in Yunnan, on the southwestern border. The poet Shi Daonan's "Dead Rat Line" describes the scene at that time as follows: "Dead rats in the east, dead rats in the west, people see dead rats like tigers, rats die for a few days, and people die like a blockage." Just a few days after Shi Daonan wrote this poem, he himself was also robbed of his young life by the plague, who was not yet 30 years old. By the second half of the 19th century, China had become the hardest hit by the plague: from the 1860s onwards, there were continuous outbreaks across Guangdong. In 1867, plague broke out in Beihai (now part of Guangxi), a port of Lianzhoufu in western Guangdong.
From 1893 to 1894, the plague was introduced to Shunde, Guangzhou and other places in the heart of the Pearl River Delta, and then to Hong Kong 86 kilometers away: on May 8, 1894, Dr. Lawson, who was acting director of the Hong Kong Public Hospital at the time, found the first case of plague in Hong Kong, and three days later there was the first case of plague death in Hong Kong. Due to the poor prevention and control of the British government in Hong Kong, the epidemic spread from hong Kong to all parts of the world: the plague spread to Taiwan in 1896, and the plague spread to Mauritius, Madagascar and other places in Africa in 1898.
Soon after, plague continued in Egypt, Japan, Portugal, Paraguay, and elsewhere. In 1900, the Philippines, Britain, Australia, and the United States were also affected. This plague should be regarded as the earliest global epidemic: at that time, some areas, represented by Singapore, used modern epidemic prevention methods to curb the spread of the epidemic, but more places were unable to stop the plague. Eventually, the plague killed more than 1 million people worldwide. In 1910, another plague broke out in northeast China that killed more than 60,000 people.
This is the first time that China has faced such a large-scale infectious disease since the birth of modern news media such as newspapers, so the record of this plague is more detailed than that of the ancient plague. The plague came to be known as "the world's worst epidemic of the 20th century." The japanese and Russian forces entrenched in northeast China also took the opportunity to try to take over the three eastern provinces in the name of epidemic prevention. Malaysian returnee Wu Liande was urgently appointed by the Qing government as the Plenipotentiary Chief Physician for Plague Control in the Three Eastern Provinces. Prior to this, the international medical community generally believed that plague was transmitted between rodents and humans through fleas.
However, based on his local observations, Wu Liande concluded that this outbreak of plague in northeast China is a new type of plague transmitted through droplets, which is the product of human-to-human transmission through the respiratory tract, that is to say, this plague can be transmitted from person to person. At that time, the traditional way to prevent and control the plague was to carry out a rat eradication campaign: the official government of Fengtian City (present-day Shenyang, Liaoning) at that time even clearly marked the price of "seven copper coins per rat hunting and rat killing, issued by the nearest patrol police.". Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces also quickly followed suit, and the entire three eastern provinces launched a vigorous rat eradication campaign.
The wave of rat extermination also spread to the Beijing-Tianjin area in Guannei, and even Hankou, thousands of miles away, issued a notice: "Whoever catches a rat and holds a police station, give two copper dollars." However, if Wu Liande's conclusion is true, then this series of prevention and control work has only been a move to hurt the people and money. Moreover, large-scale population agglomeration may be harmful to the prevention and control of the epidemic. After the on-site inspection, Wu Liande put forward nine prevention and control opinions to shi Zhaoji, minister of epidemic prevention and right hand, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: We should stop catching rats first, and then adjust the focus of prevention and control work to isolate patients, blockade epidemic areas, control traffic, and prohibit pedestrians.
These propositions of his can be summed up in the actual "lockdown" to cut off the spread of interpersonal transmission. At that time, medical experts in Japan, Russia and other countries did not believe Wu Liande's conclusion that the plague in northeast China was a new type of plague transmitted by droplets. The fact that an obscure young Chinese doctor wanted to overturn the accepted theory of the international medical community almost caused a subversive shock in the international medical community that was biased against China at that time. In the end, however, it turned out that Woollender's conclusion was correct.
It was Wu Liande's nine prevention and control opinions to the imperial court that became one of the turning points in human prevention and control of the plague. After banning pedestrian traffic, Wu Liande once again developed a dead end in the epidemic prevention and control: at that time, a large number of dead bodies were piled up on the streets that were difficult to dispose of for a while. As a doctor of microbiology, Wu Liande knew that Y. pestis could survive in low temperatures for a long time, and the winter in the northeast was obviously very suitable for the survival of Y. pestis. Although the deceased cannot be "infected by droplets", the ambulance team and the handyman in charge of the burial of the germ are still very likely to be infected.
What's more, who can guarantee that the families of the deceased will not come to mourn? Who can guarantee that germs on corpses will not cause the worst typical plague through rats? However, digging up and burying corpses in the cold northeast is no easy task. Therefore, at that time, there were thousands of corpses in Harbin that could not be buried. This has become a new source of infection, but if the body is to be buried more than a month later, then the burial union will not exist. Only cremation is the safest, most convenient and most effective way.
Chinese has always had the custom of going into the ground for safety, and burning corpses was definitely at the risk of being poked in the spine. When the idea of the cremation came to mind, Wu Liande himself was startled by himself, and when Wu Liande proposed his idea, the local magistrate and the medical staff involved in the prevention of the disease all unanimously approved of his plan. However, no one dared to make this determination easily. In view of the urgency of the epidemic, Wu Liande wrote to the imperial court to request the mandatory implementation of the cremating of corpses in the name of the Holy Will, and the imperial court also caused great controversy after receiving his report.
Three days later, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent an urgent telegram: Dr. Wu's request was allowed to proceed according to the plan. On the first day of the chinese new year, the third year of reunification, most of China is celebrating the Spring Festival, while 200 workers on a public cemetery north of Harbin pile up 100 coffins or bodies in piles and pour kerosene on a torch. More than 2,200 corpses were wiped out. Because burning dead bodies cut off the spread of plague, the death toll that had been rising in the Dowai district since that day had actually fallen. By the day after the cremating, Fu Jiadian's death toll had dropped from 183 to 165.
Since then, the number of daily deaths has been decreasing. At 0:00 p.m. on March 1, 1911, everyone in the Harbin Epidemic Prevention Bureau held their breath and waited for this moment to come. At that time, the number of deaths in the Daowai district of Harbin was zero at 0:00 a.m., followed by Changchun, Fengtian, Tieling... Good news has come from various major cities in the northeast. The Northeast plague of a hundred years ago has gradually become history, but human beings have not completely escaped the threat of plague. Since then, the plague has still had many pandemics worldwide, and there have been many epidemics in our country before liberation.
In fact, the gradual liberation of human beings from the threat of plague is more achieved with the development of modern urban construction and the cultivation of health habits: the public health environment in countries around the world today is not to say that in the 14th century, even compared with a hundred years ago, it has been greatly improved. People also no longer drink raw water, only drink boiled water, food must be fully cooked before eating, people have also begun to develop the hygiene habit of washing hands and bathing frequently. Today, the plague is largely extinct in most countries, including china, but there are still sporadic cases of occasional occurrences.
So how do we prevent plague? We ordinary people should exercise more in life and eat more foods rich in vitamin C to enhance immunity. At the same time, avoid the source of infection as much as possible: avoid contact with rodents such as rodents and marmots, avoid handling animals of unknown cause of death, and do not travel or activities to endemic areas. Since fleas bites are an important route of bubonic plague transmission, insect repellents can be used to drive away fleas in life. If you have recently been to an endemic area or have been exposed to a plague patient, you should be isolated for observation for 9 days after the fact, and if you have symptoms such as fever and cough, you should see a doctor immediately.