Good day Inky Buds, I hope you've been well. Today we're going to discuss some of the more terrible parts of history. Plagues! I hope you'll enjoy another addition to some of my most weird and gruesome posts. So, plagues, history is full of them! From wasting diseases, to huge bulbous pustules on the human skin, they have affected history in many ways and have even declined populations and ravaged villages. I will write about many of these crazy plagues, and I will include pictures on how they look on the body if they are available. Fun, isn't it? For the record, I will not be talking about Covid-19, maybe another time, but for now I will discuss some of history's worst plagues and epidemics.
Covid is still prominent today, so please follow your region's regulations.
With that, enjoy!
(Oh P.S., this may contain graphic material that may be disturbing to some readers.)
The Dancing Plague of 1518- A Mysterious Occurrence...
I shall start this compilation with a somewhat odd plague. This is one of the less graphic ones on this list, but it is somewhat disturbing. In the city of Strasbourg, modern day France, many of the townsfolks danced in a frenzy until they were...dead.
According to History.com: "The hysteria kicked off when a woman known as Frau Troffea stepped into the street and began to silently twist, twirl and shake. She kept up her solo dance-a-thon for nearly a week, and before long, some three-dozen other Strasbourgeois had joined in."
Many people question the existence of this event, but it is well documented, and it's happened in other areas like Switzerland and Germany, but they weren't as huge or deadly as the one that occurred in France. It is said that this mania claimed as many as 400 lives.
Physicians at the time blamed it on "hot blood" and thought that the affected would gyrate the fever away. A stage was constructed, and professional dancers were brought in. The town even hired a band to provide backing music, but it didn't take long for this mania to claim lives. Many of the dancers collapsed from exhaustion, while some even died of stroke or heart attack. The strange episode didn’t end until September, when the dancers were whisked away to a mountaintop shrine to pray for absolution.
Definitely one of the oddest ways to die...
Plague of Justinian (541-542 Anno Domini) - One of the Oldest Plagues Recorded, But Not the Oldest Ever
The next plague is possibly one of the oldest plagues we ever had records of. The plague of Justinian is rumored to have claimed an estimate of 100 million people's lives, which was half of the world's population back then. It was a contagious disease, caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium. It can infect humans via the Oriental rat flea. This flea is also known as the perpetrator for the bubonic plague and other tragic illnesses. According to bibilicalarchaeology.org: "Recent bacterial research has linked the Justinian Plague to the world’s most infamous affliction, the Black Death, which claimed the lives of up to 200 million people in the 14th century, as well as the third pandemic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scientists investigating DNA from the teeth of nineteen skeletons from the sixth-century German cemetery Aschheim confirmed the presence of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria associated with the bubonic and other plagues."
The plague is said to have occurred in the years (541–549 AD.) The symptoms were not so fun, as the majority of these plague symptoms aren't. Symptoms would include necrosis in the hands, the dying of cells that is mainly uncontrolled, and the lymph glands would be swollen.
Below are what the symptoms may have looked like.
*The following image may be disturbing to some viewers.*
(Necrosis on fingers)
(Swollen lymph gland on neck)
According to contemporary sources, the outbreak in Constantinople was thought to have been carried to the city by infected rats on grain ships arriving from Egypt. To feed its citizens, the city and outlying communities imported large amounts of grain, mostly from Egypt. The rat (and flea) population in Egypt thrived on feeding from the large granaries maintained by the government.
With a lot of plagues, rats were a factor, as well as their little "friends." They were mainly brought by trade routes and other overseas interactions. So, these ships had a couple of stowaways, and those stowaway rats had stowaways too.
Some people at the time noted that so many people died each day that the bodies of the dead would be stacked up in the open. As you can imagine, that is not the wisest idea, luckily, we know that now and tend to the dead effectively, while not jeopardizing the unaffected people.
Prehistoric Chinese Epidemic (circa 3000 B.C.) - The Oldest Epidemic Ever Found
Here we have a plague even older than the Plague of Justinian. It is stated that it occurred about 5,000 years ago and wiped out a prehistoric village in China. This was a gruesome find not just because of the finding of a terrible plague, but also because of the remains of 97 people found inside of the well-preserved house.
No one was spared from this plague it seemed. The bodies of juveniles, adults, and middle-aged people were all mixed into this mass grave. Since that plague took place thousands of years ago, there is no current records of what the plague was, or what went down. Scientists in Sweden may have some leads, suggesting that Y. Pestis was the culprit. A 5,000-year-old tomb was discovered in Frälsegården, Sweden, with 79 corpses. Someone buried the skeletons hastily, similar to the Hamin Mangha village in China. Yersinia Pestis is also responsible for the Black Death. You may remember that Y. Pestis is also the cause of the Plague of Justinian. Man, they just never learn that rats are disease ridden...
It is believed that these victims were buried in such an odd fashion so that the plague wouldn't affect the living. Other reasons are that the victims simply had no one to take care of them, or the families couldn't afford a suitable funeral. Unfortunately, many of these plagues are a result of unhygienic conditions, mingling with rats, and their fleas.
The Cocoliztli Epidemic (1545-1548)- A Mysterious Tragedy that Stymied Many
This next epidemic was a mysterious illness in which high fevers and bleeding killed millions in New Spain. Based on the death toll, this outbreak is often referred to as the worst epidemic in the history of Mexico. Cocoliztli is Nahuatl for "pestilence." This disease baffled both native and Spanish doctors alike. Recent bacterial genomic studies have suggested that salmonella, specifically a serotype of Salmonella enterica known as Paratyphi C, was at least partially responsible for this initial outbreak. Other sources suggest that a viral hemorrhagic fever caused by terrible droughts, and poor living conditions for the indigenous people as an aftermath of the Spanish conquest.
Shortly after 1548, the Spanish started calling the disease tabardillo (typhus), which the Spanish had recognized since the late 15th century. n 1970, a historian named Germaine Somolinos d'Ardois looked systematically at the proposed explanations, including hemorrhagic influenza, leptospirosis, malaria, typhus, typhoid, and yellow fever. According to Somolinos d'Ardois, none of these quite matched the 16th-century accounts of cocoliztli, leading him to conclude the disease was a result of a "viral process of hemorrhagic influence." In other words, Somolinos d'Ardois believed cocoliztli was not the result of any known Old-World pathogen but possibly a virus of New World origins.
According to the Wikipedia article on this subject: "There are accounts of similar diseases striking Mexico in pre-Columbian times. The Codex Chimalpopoca states that an outbreak of bloody diarrhea occurred in Colhuacan in 1320."
Historians suggest that this disease may have been measles, typhus, or smallpox, however the problem is that the symptoms don't match. DNA evidence published in 2018 suggests the culprit of the disease was...salmonella!
Yes, that is a bit underwhelming, you can get salmonella easily if you undercook your chicken or get food poisoning. It is as common as the cold but can be fatal. Some people with salmonella infection have no symptoms. Most people develop diarrhea, fever and stomach (abdominal) cramps within 8 to 72 hours after exposure. Most healthy people recover within a few days to a week without specific treatment.
Life-threatening complications also may develop if the infection spreads beyond the intestines. The risk of getting salmonella infection is higher with travel to countries without clean drinking water and proper sewage disposal.
It is believed that salmonella was brought over by the Europeans.
The evidence was tucked in the teeth of 29 skeletons unearthed from the ruins of an ancient city archaeologists call Teposcolula Yucundaa in the Oaxaca region of Mexico.
The death toll was great, ranging from 5 to 15 million people.
However, the research states that salmonella is not the only culprit. It was simply one of the multiple infections that the indigenous people could have contracted. Salmonella is not entirely fatal by itself but imagine that combined with 2-3 other illnesses. That would make salmonella a thousand times worst with an already compromised immune system.
American Polio Pandemic (1916)- A Terrible Pandemic that Affected Many Children
The next illness was very impactful historically. It led to the research of vaccines and cures. It was fairly recent as far as mass sweeps of illnesses go. The first major documented polio outbreak in the United States occurred in Rutland County, Vermont. Eighteen deaths and 132 cases of permanent paralysis were reported. Polio, or poliomyelitis, is a disabling and life-threatening disease caused by the poliovirus. The virus spreads from person to person and can infect a person’s spinal cord, causing paralysis. It affected many children and brought fear for parents. Even the painter Frida Kahlo was diagnosed with polio at the age of 6.
Polio starts out as flu-like symptoms and will go away on their own, but on the instance that it doesn't, it affects the body in terrible ways. It causes meningitis and paralysis. Even children who seem to fully recover can develop new muscle pain, weakness, or paralysis as adults, 15 to 40 years later.
This is known as post-polio syndrome, and can also result in atrophy, sleep apnea, fatigue, and progressed muscle/joint weakness and or pain. A polio epidemic that started in New York City caused 27,000 cases and 6,000 deaths in the United States.
It is usually spread through saliva droplets in the air or contact with the affected person's feces.
A number of social distancing actions were taken, such as cautioning children not to drink out of public water fountains, and to stay away from public places like amusement parks. Hiram M. Hiller Jr. was one of the physicians in several cities who realized what they were dealing with, but the nature of the disease remained largely a mystery. In the absence of proven treatments, a number of odd and potentially dangerous polio treatments were suggested. In John Haven Emerson's A Monograph on the Epidemic of Poliomyelitis (Infantile Paralysis) in New York City in 1916, one suggested remedy reads:
"Give oxygen through the lower extremities, by positive electricity. Frequent baths using almond meal, or oxidising the water. Applications of poultices of Roman chamomile, slippery elm, arnica, mustard, cantharis, amygdalae dulcis oil, and of special merit, spikenard oil and Xanthoxolinum. Internally use caffeine, Fl. Kola, dry muriate of quinine, elixir of cinchone, radium water, chloride of gold, liquor calcis and wine of pepsin."
Sometimes the polio symptoms would be so severe that some patients had to use an iron lung. An iron lung is an NPV or a Negative Pressure Ventilator, which encases the person inside of it, and varies the air pressure in the enclosed space, to stimulate breathing. It helps with patients that lost muscle control, or the function of breathing exceeds the person's abilities. This helped with polio patients as well as patients with botulism.
The use of iron lungs is largely obsolete in modern medicine, as more modern breathing therapies have been developed, and due to the eradication of polio in most of the world. However, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic revived some interest in the device as a cheap, readily producible substitute for positive-pressure ventilators, which were feared to be outnumbered by patients potentially needing temporary artificially assisted respiration.
Today, polio is less common and almost completely terminated.
The Bubonic Plague (1347-1353)- The Plague with Many Names
This was possibly one of the worst plagues and most devastating. You've heard about it; school probably taught you about it. It is notorious for its death toll, and the terrible impression it leaves on its victims. While it is only one plague, it can take many clinical forms, depending on how the victim was exposed to the bacteria. The most common are bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic. A terrible trifecta of one malevolent infection.
While there are little to no traces of city-ravaging plague right now, some places in the world still have the mark of the Black Death. In fact, in places such as the Western USA, the plague exists as an animal disease. Gophers are a perfect example of it. Wild animals are known to carry many diseases like rabies, but you never would have guessed the pest in your garden is carrying an ancient disease within its body.
All varieties of the bubonic plague are caused by one bacterium. I bet you remember him from the first thousand plagues. Please welcome to the stage: Yersinia Pestis!
This evil microorganism is transmitted by infected fleas that are carried on rats. Let's learn a bit more about the 3 variants:
Septicemic plague is a systemic disease involving infection of the blood. It can cause disseminated intravascular coagulation and is almost always fatal when untreated. It results in necrosis and symptoms include things like bleeding under the skin, shock, low blood pressure, and organ failure to name a few. I have displayed am image of the necrosis below. *Graphic warning: May be disturbing to some readers*
Pneumonic plague is a variant that affects the lungs. Symptoms include fever, headaches, shortness of breath, chest pains, and coughing. The symptoms start about 3-7 days after exposure to the bacteria.
The last is the most recognizable, the bubonic version. One to seven days after exposure to the bacteria, flu-like symptoms develop. These symptoms include fever, headaches, and vomiting, as well as swollen and painful lymph nodes occurring in the area closest to where the bacteria entered the skin. Acral necrosis, the dark discoloration of skin, is another symptom. Occasionally, swollen lymph nodes, known as "buboes," may break open.
This plague also brought the rise of plague doctors. You may recognize them with their odd masks and black garbs. These doctors were hired by the cities to tend to the sick. They would do it regardless of income, since the poor couldn't pay. However, the people saw them as a harbinger of death, or a signal that death was near. Keep in mind that you didn't really need all the requirements you need today to become a doctor. In very few cases, the doctors cured their patients. In almost all cases, the doctors weren't experienced. The majority were volunteers, and second-rate doctors.
Above is an image of a Venetian plague doctor. Their masks are designed to hold herbs. The mask had small nose holes and was a type of respirator which contained aromatic items. The first known observation of the herbal-stuffed beak was from the epidemic in Rome in 1656. The beak could hold dried flowers (like roses and carnations), herbs (like lavender and peppermint), camphor, or a vinegar sponge, as well as juniper berry, ambergris, cloves, labdanum, myrrh, and storax.
This would help the doctors keep their hands free and easily handle corpses and decaying patients. It kept the bad smells away and was believed to have similar effects to the function of a medical face mask in the present. The smell taken with the most caution was known as miasma, a noxious form of "bad air". They believed that the smells emanating from the corpses lead to the illness. They weren't necessarily wrong with that theory.
The people back then didn't know how to treat this disease, but they figured it had something to do with proximity.
At first, sailors were held on their ships for 30 days, which became known in Venetian law as a trentino. As time went on, the Venetians increased the forced isolation to 40 days or a quarantino, the origin of the word quarantine and the start of its practice in the Western world. The plague isn't completely gone as the map earlier in this section shows, but it isn't as bad as it used to be.
AIDS Pandemic (1981-present)- A Disease That Isn't Completely Gone
For the last pandemic of this article, I will discuss a more recent, and still somewhat ongoing, outbreak. AIDS or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a chronic disease that is spread through sexual contact, shared needles, or through birth and breastfeeding. HIV attacks a specific type of immune system cell in the body. It’s known as the CD4 helper cell or T cell. When HIV destroys this cell, it becomes harder for the body to fight off other infections.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the outbreak of HIV and AIDS swept across the United States and rest of the world, though the disease originated decades earlier. HIV infection in humans came from a type of chimpanzee in Central Africa. Studies show that HIV may have jumped from chimpanzees to humans as far back as the late 1800s.
It was most likely transmitted from our simian counterparts to humans from times when humans would hunt chimpanzees for meat and eat them.
In 1999, researchers identified a strain of chimpanzee SIV called SIVcpz, which was nearly identical to HIV. Chimps, the scientist later discovered, hunt and eat two smaller species of monkeys—red-capped mangabeys and greater spot-nosed monkeys—that carry and infect the chimps with two strains of SIV. These two strains likely combined to form SIVcpz, which can spread between chimpanzees and humans.
The virus spread may have spread from Kinshasa along infrastructure routes (roads, railways, and rivers) via migrants and the sex trade.
"This disease came into the USA around the 1970's because of the infected migrants. In 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report about five previously healthy homosexual men becoming infected with Pneumocystis pneumonia, which is caused by the normally harmless fungus Pneumocystis jirovecii. This type of pneumonia, the CDC noted, almost never affects people with uncompromised immune systems."
Because the disease appeared to affect mostly homosexual men, officials initially called it gay-related immune deficiency, or GRID.
Though the CDC clarified that homosexual partners aren't the only ones that could be affected by this disease, the public considered the disease a "gay disease." There was even a point that AIDS/HIV was called the "gay plague."
In 1984, researchers finally identified the cause of AIDS—the HIV virus—and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licensed the first commercial blood test for HIV in 1985.
Today, numerous tests can detect HIV, most of which work by detecting HIV antibodies. The tests can be done on blood, saliva, or urine, though the blood tests detect HIV sooner after exposure due to higher levels of antibodies.
Many people were dying, the toll is currently 40.1 million since the beginning of the pandemic. One of the first celebrity fatalities was Rock Hudson, who died of the illness in 1985.
In fear of HIV getting into blood banks, the FDA also enacted regulations that ban gay men from donating blood. The FDA would revise its rules in 2015 to allow gay men to give blood if they’ve been celibate for a year, though blood banks routinely test blood for HIV.
By the end of 1985, there were more than 20,000 reported cases of AIDS, with at least one case in every region of the world.
In 1987, the first antiretroviral medication for HIV, azidothymidine (AZT), became available.
The World Health Organization (WHO), in 1988, declared December 1st to be World AIDS Day. By the end of the decade, there were at least 100,000 reported cases of AIDS in the United States and WHO estimated 400,000 AIDS cases worldwide.
In 1991, the red ribbon became a symbol of AIDS/HIV awareness.
In that year, basketball player Magic Johnson announced that he had HIV, and hoped to bring further awareness, and ward of the stereotype that only gays had the disease. Soon after in the same year, Queen's lead singer Freddie Mercury announced that he had the disease, and then died a day later.
In 1994, the FDA approved the first oral (and non-blood) HIV test. Two years later, it approved the first home testing kit and the first urine test.
AIDS related deaths began to decrease a lot in 1995 thanks to further advancements in the field of medicine, and the introduction of HAART. However, by 1999, AIDS was the fourth biggest cause of death in the world and the leading cause of death in Africa.
In 2009, U.S. President Barrack Obama lifted a ban that prevented HIV positive people from entering the country.
The FDA approved pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, for HIV-negative people in 2012. When taken daily, PrEP can reduce the risk of HIV from sex by more than 90 percent and from intravenous drug use by 70 percent, according to the CDC.
A study conducted in 2019 showed that over 750 gay men on an anti-viral treatment did not transmit the virus to their partners.
Thanks to these advancements, tests, and time put into the research of the disease, the illness of AIDS/HIV isn't as prominent as before, but now we have ways to trace it in early stages, and to prevent it from happening. Condoms also help reduce the risk and prevents the transmission of the disease between partners.
In conclusion, advancements and efforts made in the past helped pave the way for future generations of doctors and continue to do so as the years go by. History has seen many terrible things like war, genocide, and yes, plagues, but we were strong enough to go beyond it, better understand it, and find a cure.
I hope you've learned a little something today Inky Buds, I learned a bit as well while I wrote this article. I find this aspect of history interesting, and I even considered being a pathologist on historical diseases at one point in my life, I am still intrigued by pathology today and am glad that I have this knowledge, but I found my calling as a writer.
That is all for today!
Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day🏙️/night🌃and have a happy December! ❄️⛄🏂
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