Yersinia Pestis

Yersinia pestis invaded the continental United States in 1900 and subsequently became established in wild rodent populations in several western states, traversing 2,250 km in approximately 40 years. However, the specific path of the eastward expansion of plague into the United States is poorly understood. We directly calculated velocities of disease spread and performed trend-surface analyses on spatio-temporally unique plague cases to clarify the route and speed of the initial spread of plague eastward. Velocities of disease spread were then analyzed using multiple linear regression models to identify environmental features that significantly impacted the rate of spread. Between one and three introductions of plague along the Pacific coast were observed, after which plague traveled from 45 to 87 km/year. In all regression models, the coast ranges of California were associated with slower spread, and the Southern Rockies were associated with a significant increase in the rate of dis...

This post, on the Arc-Medieval, Global Medieval Studies blog, recounts my experiences teaching my undergraduate course, "The Black Death: Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World." Over the course of the past decade and a half, there has been a radical change in scientific understandings of the evolution and spread of *Yersinia pestis*, the causative organism of plague. This course is based on the idea that that evolutionary history can also serve as the foundation for an epidemiological and cultural history of plague, a disease that has spread in just 2000 years to all the continents of the world (save Antartica). The course focuses on the most awful plague pandemic, the Black Death, but it examines it within the whole global history of plague up to the present day. The blog includes links both to the complete syllabus and to other resources we used throughout the semester.

An excavation carried out in 2007 in Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse (Aude-Languedoc, southern France), revealed a medieval rural cemetery used during the 8th–14th centuries. One hundred and forty nine graves were identified. Amongst those, three burials radiocarbon dated to the 14th century contained the remains of several individuals. No paleotraumatological evidences of violence due to warfare or to a civil massacre were identified in the exhumed skeletons. Therefore, we hypothesized that the simultaneous inhumations could have occurred during the “Black Death” outbreak or during one of its resurgences. A rapid diagnostic test for the detection of Yersinia pestis F1 antigen was applied to the nine putative plague victims to authenticate the cause of their death. Seven of the nine individuals tested from the three graves were positive to Y. pestis F1 antigen. We additionally tested fourteen skeletons from single graves archaeologically dated to the 13th–14th centuries. Four of them were positive to Y. pestis F1 antigen, thus showing a higher mortality rate due to plague than originally expected. The Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse plague victims are the oldest samples from which Y. pestis F1 antigen has been, hitherto, identified. Few rural French cemetery containing plague victims have previously been identified and amongst them, only one dates to the 14th century. In the present report, we provide suggestive evidence of a second rural cemetery from southern France where victims of Y. pestis infection were buried. Our findings provide new information about the management of the plagued corpses during the “Black Death” in small rural communities.

This is the abstract of a paper that was presented at the 94th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 7-9, 2019, as part of the session: Plague as a Pan-Eurasian Phenomenon: Same Disease, Differing Mortalities.

Keywords: Black Death; Yersinia pestis; Mongol Empire; historical epidemiology; paleogenetics; phylogenetics.

A much-revised version of the paper was published as: Monica H. Green, “The Four Black Deaths,” American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (December 2020), 1600-1631, DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhaa511, plus Supplemental Material, “Marmots and Their Plague Strains.” Both can be found here: https://doi.org/10.17613/7020-8j08. Feel free to contact me directly: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

This paper was presented at the 2016 Arizona Council for History Education Conference (ACHE). The conference theme this year was "Community, Connections, and Perspectives in History": "Good history teachers know that making connections among historical events, modern events, and students' lives is the key to engaging students in history. Conference participants will explore connections between communities and also how local perspectives can be used to make broader national and global connections to historical events. Sessions will include U.S., world, and Arizona history; innovative ways to teach and share history; and address the Arizona literacy standards for history/social studies."

This paper draws on my on-going work, both in teaching and in research, to craft new, more encompassing narratives about the largest pandemic in human history, the Black Death. The argument I am presenting here is that, since we have plague in our natural environment here in Arizona, we can use that as the "hook" to get students involved in the historical question: how did it get here? The answer (to collapse it a bit) is that it took a steam ship from China. And the strain of plague that was found in China at the end of the 19th century can now be shown to be directly related to the strain that caused the Black Death in the 14th century.

The science that allows us to tell these stories can get pretty complicated, but there are ways to break it down into nuggets the students can grasp. Further details about my syllabi and teaching methods can be found here on Academia.edu under the "Global Health - Teaching Documents" section of my page. Also, this blog post describes my most recent experience of teaching my Black Death course: https://mip-archumanitiespress.org/blog/2015/08/27/teaching-the-new-paradigm-in-black-death-studies/.

Based on discussion at the conference, what I've posted here now are: (a) the slides I presented at the ACHE meeting; and (b) a Bibliography that lists not only the sources for the slides, but also some additional bibliography that may prove helpful in developing lesson plans for teaching at the K-12 level. There is a lot of material that is now available open-access, so we have more opportunities than ever before to let students see in concrete ways how a global approach to history really works.

The Justinianic Plague, which started in the 6th century and lasted to the mid-8th century, is thought to be the first of three historically documented plague pandemics causing massive casualties. Historical accounts and molecular data suggest the bacterium Yersinia pestis as its etiological agent. Here we present a new high-coverage (17.9 fold) Y. pestis genome obtained from a 6th-century skeleton recovered from a southern German burial site close to Munich. The reconstructed genome enabled the detection of 30 unique substitutions as well as structural differences that have not been previously described. We report indels affecting a lacl family transcription regulator gene as well as non-synonymous substitutions in the nrdE, fadJ and pcp genes, that have been suggested as plague virulence determinants or have been shown to be upregulated in different models of plague infection. In addition, we identify 19 false positive substitutions in a previously published lower coverage Y. pest...

This essay appears as the Preface to: *Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death*, ed. Monica H. Green (Kalamazoo, MI, and Bradford, UK: Arc-Medieval Press, 2015), pp. ix-xx. This is the HARDBOUND edition of essays that first appeared in 2014 in the journal, *The Medieval Globe*. This preface (as well an accompanying index) are new in the book version, which can be purchased from Arc-Medieval Press (ISBN 978-1-942401-00-1).

The *Medieval Globe* volume went to press in Spring of 2014, before the full import of the 2013-2015 West African Ebola outbreak had become clear. By the Fall of 2014, comparisons were being made between what was still an exponentially growing outbreak in West Africa and the greatest pandemic of human history, the Black Death. Many of those comparisons were specious, but they pointed to the real terror that both diseases created, not simply by the swiftness of the mortality they caused, but by the social disruptions they produced. The present essay was an attempt to bring some greater historical analysis to the question of how we think comparatively across time periods and contexts. I welcome further discussion of these questions.

This was an invited presentation presented at the GlobAfrica Workshop, “Did the Plague Impact Sub-Saharan Africa Before 1899? A GlobAfrica Workshop,” held at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, April 22-23, 2016, and sponsored by Gérard Chouin, Associate Professor of History.

There are three attachments, all downloadable: 1) the poster for the event; 2) my individual abstract; and 3) the collected program and abstracts of all presentations.

A much-revised version of this was published in 2018 in the peer-reviewed journal, *Afriques*, https://journals.openedition.org/afriques/2125. Feel free to contact via e-mail should you wish to have any further information: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

UPDATE: For some reason, many of the links in the original PDF of this file didn't open. I'm therefore posting the original Word .doc so users have full access to the links. (Revision posted 07 Jan 2022)

The original version of this essay was published in 2018. Presented here is an updated version, incorporating not only new genetic and historical scholarship on plague history, but also some observations on why the 2nd Plague Pandemic (13th to 19th century) offers some useful insights for how we might think about our own present pandemic moment. Not a syllabus, this is rather a guide to the best scholarship in the field right now with some strategies for how instructors might chose topic themes around which to organize their instruction.

Among the new sections is a discussion of new work on the *pestis secunda*, the "Second Plague" which struck western Eurasia about a decade after the initial Black Death. The latest phylogenetic analysis suggests that these subsequent outbreaks were caused by at least two different strains of plague, which likely came out of different reservoirs than the initial strains of 1346-1350. In other words, like our present pandemic, with its waves of Delta and Omicron variants, the late medieval pandemic, too, likely had genetically distinct pulses caused by the early establishment of multiple reservoirs.

A general bibliography on both the 1st and 2nd Plague Pandemics, which is regularly updated, is maintained separately at this link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x0D_dwyAwp9xi9sMCW5UvpGfEVH5J2ZA/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=104263744463668175127&rtpof=true&sd=true.

Questions? Feel free to contact me: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

An addendum: the day after I posted this, an important new essay appeared on Ibn Battuta's accounts of the Black Death. I highly recommend it (it's already posted here on Academia.edu): Claudia Maria Tresso, “A Two-year Journey under the Arrows of the Black Death: The Medieval Plague Pandemic in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Travels,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 21 (2021), 137-189.

Several disciplines – including genetics, bioarchaeology, and documentary history – contribute to the stories we tell of humankind’s major infectious diseases over the past 100,000 years. In some cases, these diseases have dispersed globally because, as obligate pathogens, they have gone wherever their human hosts have gone. Thus, tuberculosis, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, and HIV/AIDS have traveled along paths (and via technologies) that have moved human populations to all five inhabited continents and Oceania. In other cases, diseases have moved because humans transported microenvironments that brought pathogens along; this would describe the histories of malaria, plague, and cholera. However, many aspects of these narratives are still under debate, including their chronologies and geographic trajectories. This essay will not attempt to settle those debates, but, rather, suggest why the points of debate matter. How does the story change if we alter the chronology by several thousand years, or propose different geographical routes?
Key words: global health, bioarchaeology, historical method, phylogenetics, aDNA

For information on the volume as a whole, see the CUP website: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/archaeology/prehistory/human-dispersal-and-species-movement-prehistory-present?format=HB&isbn=9781107164147.

This is the syllabus for my advanced undergraduate class, "Global History of Health." First taught in 2009 with my former colleague, Rachel Scott (now of DePaul University), this course combines the analytical perspectives of genetics, paleopathology, and documentary history to chart the origins, proliferation, globalization, and (to varying degrees) identification and control of eight major globally distributed diseases.

Those diseases are: malaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, plague, leprosy, syphilis, cholera, and HIV/AIDS. A separate file posted here on Academia.edu (also under my "Global Health - Teaching Documents" section) is a chart outlining the eight diseases and major elements of their histories.

Feel free to contact me if you want additional information on any of the topics I address here. My e-mail is: monica.h.green@gmail.com. (NOTE: As noted above, this course was developed jointly with my former colleague in bioarchaeology. The course used to be taught cross-listed with courses in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU. As of 2018, SHESC terminated its affiliation with me.)

This is a comprehensive bibliography of current scholarship on the Black Death and the early centuries of the Second Plague Pandemic up to ca. 1500. It was prepared to accompany the Medieval Academy of America Webinar, "The Mother of All Pandemics: The State of Black Death Research in the Era of COVID-19," which was held on 15 May 2020 (YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzqR1S8cbX8&feature=youtu.be). Also included is a bibliography, prepared by Monica H. Green, on the First Plague Pandemic, also known as the Justinianic Plague. Both bibliographies are continually being revised, so check back periodically on Google Docs to get the latest version: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x0D_dwyAwp9xi9sMCW5UvpGfEVH5J2ZA/view?usp=sharing.

A copy of the Bibliography as of 30 August 2023 is archived at Knowledge Commons, with a citable DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/57tg-sz07. A second archived copy, revised through 15 March 2024, can also be found at Knowledge Commons, under the DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/sc4h-fw44.

According to recent researches bearers of H2a1 MtDNA suddenly appeared between Araxes, Don and Volga Rivers during Chalcolithic and spread in Eurasia until Late Bronze Age during what is commonly called Indo-European Migrations. We demonstrate in this paper that this sudden and fast expansion is in fact the last step of a prior and longer ethnogenesis's process for the H2a MtDNA bearers rooted to Levantine Pastoralism for Milk that expanded before and after Late Glacial Maximum (LGM). It also demonstrates that women were a key element in the Neolithic Revolution and proposes the theory according to which their strong political position was linked to a solid oral transmission of knowledge that has been weakened by the new 'way of like' that shortened their life's expectancy due to the convergence of an increased birth rate and the apparition of new diseases (Yersinia Pestis/ Tuberculosis). Then the H2a MtDNA weak demic diffusion of Agriculture/ Pastoralism was accompanied by a strong cultural diffusion that also blurred cultural epicentres. However, this balance reversed in Lesser Caucasus during Chalcolithic, particularly in Hal (Vorotan River, Lesser Caucasus) where favourable political and geoclimatic conditions promoted this 'women's caste' specialized in domestication and dairying products (Cheese) to became major building block of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic expansions in Europe. In the aftermath of a first migration towards Balkans/ Calabria, a second expansion of H2a1 MtDNA towards the Eurasian steppe (Bronze Age) was the result of a successful political adaptation to rapid and radical political changes in Transcaucasia due to the emergence of a nomadic military/ merchant's caste specialized in equitation and warfare. In other words, both Neolithic and Chalcolithic expansions diffused the scarce H2a MtDNA and the omnipresent H2a1 MtDNA lineages who enriched a single common cultural background that reveals the whole history of populations since the Pre-Pottery Neolithic to Eneolithic.

Revised: 17 Dec 2023.
The editor of the Contagions blog, Michelle Ziegler, passed away on 25 June 2022. May her memory be a blessing. At the moment, her blog remains accessible on the Web.
This file was originally posted here as two separate PDFs. To enable discovery, I am posting a single, combined file instead.
Monica H. Green (formerly Twitter: @MonicaMedHist ; now Bluesky: @monicamedhist.bsky.social), a historian of medieval medicine, and Boris Schmid (@BorisVSchmid), a theoretical biologist at the University of Oslo, Norway, engage in a dialogue about the historical implications of the SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms), which are keys to understanding the evolutionary development and, possibly, the chronology and geography, of the strains of plague involved in the Black Death and other plague outbreaks in subsequent years.

The dialogue was originally published as two blog posts on Michelle Ziegler's *Contagions* blog, https://contagions.wordpress.com/. Part 1 can be found here: https://contagions.wordpress.com/2016/06/27/plague-dialogues-monica-green-and-boris-schmid-on-plague-phylogeny-i/. And Part 2 is here: https://contagions.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/plague-dialogues-monica-green-and-boris-schmid-on-plague-phylogeny-ii/.

This is the abstract for a talk that was presented online on Thursday, 20 January 2022. The talk was recorded; it can be accessed now on the Stanford website: https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPST/colloquia.html. (Scroll down to find the link to my talk.) Here is a revised version of the abstract, now with a list of references cited in the talk.

If H2a1 Mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) bearers suddenly appeared in Eastern Europe in late 6th millennium BC and were omnipresent during Eurasian Copper and Bronze Ages, their modern dispersion's pattern seems to indicate they consciously overlapped Palaeolithic sites we have linked to the practice of early medicine. However they brought new characteristics from a prior southeastern Anatolian (Taurus Mountains) and Levantine (Galilea) ethnogenesis based on the convergence of Pastoralism for Milk (PM), co-evolution between gene and food practice implying the development of Lactase Persistence (LP), the Early Seeds Processing and specific associated behaviours such as selected body parts or perforated teeth as beads in burials. A Levantine thaumaturgical and matriarchal organization based on military force seemed to have synthesized all these influences and has diffused a culture whose elements are all reunited in the grave of Individual from Hilazon Tachtit Stage D (12000 cal BP, Natufian Culture). The lineage seemed to have followed the Fertile Crescent corridor that leads to Lesser Caucasus and reconstituted in Karabakh, close to the Kalavan-1 site, most of the Natufian cultural context. During Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), while H2a1 MtDNA bearers expanded in Western Asia by Levant to become one of the most frequent sub-haplogroup of H, the corridor that promoted exchanges between Armenian Obsidian sites and the later Halaf site of Domuztepe, close to the modern Cilician H2a1 MtDNA hotspot, imposed advanced agricultural technics on the Araxes and Vorotan rivers. Thanks to a solid transgenerational transmission of medicinal practices that allowed overpassing the simultaneous development of new diseases like Yersinia Pestis, the innovative woman's lineage became a key element in the new population's admixture from Araxes – Vorotan-Hakari Rivers, future pillar of the Kura-Araxes Culture. While the agricultural Halaf influence extended towards the Caspian maritime plain, Bolgarçay River (Azerbaijan) and Gilan, (Iran), medicinal exchanges with central Asia triggered a new military network specialized in the trade of Boric acid and projected H2a1 MtDNA bearers in Inner Asia. West, the Transcaucasian expansion of H2a1 MtDNA bearers put an end to the Shulaveri-Shomu Tepe culture and their penetration between Don and Volga broadcasted thaumaturgy and advanced agricultural technics until Rhine following Gravettian sites we have demonstrated to be dedicated to medical practices. A last wave of H2a1 MtDNA coincides with the expansion of the Kura Araxes Culture in all Fertile Crescent and reached Atlantic during late 3 rd and early 2 nd millennia BC, changing the whole agricultural landscape of Western Europe until the Roman Empire. This paper demonstrate that Epi Palaeolithic elites were personally engaged in the survival and well-being of their groups, the Neolithic increasing demography forcing them to find solutions (*həll (n.) modern Azeri) making the 'Hellenism' the common base of the Indo-European culture born in Fertile Crescent.

NOTE: This course was last taught in 2017. Much new work has come out on the history of plague and the late medieval pandemic since then, some of it overturning long-held truisms. Please consult my "Plague Studies" tab and the general bibliography, "The Mother of All Pandemics" for the most recent work in the field.
These readings supplement the main Syllabus for my course, "The Black Death: Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World." The students are divided into groups at the beginning of the semester and work collaboratively for the rest of the semester. The Group Readings form the basis for the special presentations they make to the rest of the class. The Group projects allow them to go deep into specific topics for a short period of time, and will, it is hoped, expose them to both primary sources and secondary sources they can use for their research projects. The ten groups this year are as follows:
- The Invisible Origins of the Second Pandemic: The Qinghai-Tibet
Plateau
- Plague Lies in Wait: What Was the Mechanism of Spread into Central Eurasia?
- Plague Reaches the Islamicate World
- Plague in Southern Europe: Initial Impact
- Religion, Politics, and Catastrophe: The Black Death and the Jews
- Plague in Northern Europe (England)
- Plague in Northern Europe (Beyond England)
- Plague and the Great Transition: Living in a Cold, Diseased World
- Plague Shapes the Early Modern World
- Plague Becomes a Global Disease: The Third Pandemic
-

"Marmots and Their Plague Strains," Supplemental Data to Monica H. Green, "The Four Black Deaths" (2020). This file gathers evidence for the location and species of plague-bearing marmots found in Eurasia, together with the genotype of the strains of Yersinia pestis they harbor. It is meant to support an incidental finding of the main study: that is, that aside from what seems to be a natural sequence of pre-polytomy Yersinia pestis infections of the adjacent marmot populations of the Tian Shan range (which move in an evolutionary progression from the northeast edge of the range toward the southwest), all other documentable Y. pestis infections in marmots are postpolytomy Y. pestis strains. That includes marmot populations in present-day Siberia, Mongolia, western and central China, Tibet, and Nepal. Since I suggest that human activity likely caused Y. pestis to move out of the Tian Shan range, it follows that the spread of postpolytomy lineages to other, non-adjacent marmot populations should be seen as anthropogenic, too.

Here is the full citation: Monica H. Green, “The Four Black Deaths,” American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (December 2020), 1600-1631, DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhaa511, plus Supplemental Material, “Marmots and Their Plague Strains,” https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/125/5/1601/6040962). If you do not have access to the journal, both the article and the accompanying supplement can be found here: https://doi.org/10.17613/7020-8j08. Feel free to contact me directly: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

This is the announcement for a public lecture I gave on 1 June 2022. Sponsored by the Istituto di Studi sull'Asia at the University of Turin, the talk summarized what is now known about the history of plague in Asia in the later medieval period. The work draws on findings from genetics, archaeology, and re-readings of primary documentation from the period.

Thanks to a pluri-disciplinary approach using archaeogenetics, archaeology and linguistics, this paper proposes the Ishkhanasar Mountain and Aghitu to be the place of the mythic flood at the origin of the Noah’s history. It also proposes the hypothesis according to which the flood was followed by a Yersinia Pestis outbreak leading to the development of a new cultural entity focused on medicine.

Short Description
Significance: By the details of the symptom description, the treatment options, and the regionalisation the evil kernel descriptions may well be identified as suspected bubonic plague. BENEDICTOW (2004: 41) hypothesized that evil kernel swellings may be considered to be sporadic incidences of endemic plague.

Abstract
For more than hundred years the textual documentation of evil kernel swellings (è hé zhǒng 惡核腫) consisted of merely two passages YU Botao cited 1910 in his Nuanced Points on Bubonic Plague. Identification with lymph node swellings due to Yersinia pestis infection was made easy by projecting backwards colloquial expressions for plague buboes that likewise made use of a fruit kernel metaphor (Li Yushang 2002a). Since WU Lien-teh et al. (1936: 11) took this point from YU this two-passage-story was never questioned. But while BENEDICTOW (2010: 499) asserted that the two medical texts’ “clinical descriptions are unambiguous”, BUELL (2012: 132-135) considered them to be “too vague to say for sure”.
This interim report expands on preliminary findings that enlarged the number of medical texts on the evil kernel topic. Among them, the source text to both of the above-mentioned passages was found in a fragment of the Xiao pin fang 小品方 written between 454 and 473 CE by CHEN Yanzhi 陳延之 (PFISTER 2019). It was considered indispensable for medical students both in the Tang Code and ancient Japanese codes (KOSOTO 1986).
The work gives both a theoretical elucidation of evil kernels and two prescriptions to treat them. It describes the size and terrible painfulness of the swellings, the strong fever and shivers, psychologic changes, and uses the dispersion of an unspecific poison in the body as explanatory model. This complex sign of disease is regionalised as being one often seen in the southern parts of China.
The degree to that one was acquainted with the disease is shown in Chan jing 產經, which gives a prescription adapted to children. SUN Simiao modifies the regionalisation of the disease, and adds specific travel advice for officials deployed in these regions.

Panel *104: The ‘New Paradigm’ of Plague Studies:  Expanded Geographies and Chronologies of the Medieval Pandemics, Organized by: William H. York.
May 10, 2022, 11:00 EDT; 17:00 CEST

The 57th International Congress on Medieval Studies will take place online Monday, May 9, through Saturday, May 14, 2022.
https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress

For those who have made use of my March 2018 essay, "On Learning How to Teach the Black Death," here is a second update (as of October 2020) of developments from the past two and a half years to help you update your lecture notes. This has an added section at the end with some thoughts on how to teach Black Death narratives with an eye toward our current situation with COVID-19.

Given the speed with which new work has been appearing in plague studies, I will be drafting a further update to this guide in the coming weeks. Of most immediate importance for those who are teaching the Justinianic Plague (First Plague Pandemic, 6th-8th century CE) is this new overview of the field, available open-access: Peter Sarris, “New Approaches to the ‘Plague of Justinian’,” Past and Present, published online 13 November 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab024.

Of importance for those interested in the history of plague in the Islamicate world, this survey of original sources is vital: Mustakim Arıcı, trans. Faruk Akyıldız, “Silent Sources of the History of Epidemics in the Islamic World: Literature on Ṭāʿūn/Plague Treatises,” Nazariyat: Journal for the History of Islamic Philosophy and Sciences 7, no. 1 (April 2021), 99-158, https://www.nazariyat.org/en/issues/cilt-7-sayi-1/mustakim-arici.

Feel free to follow up with questions on Twitter if you have any: @monicaMedHist.

A new type of evidence exists now to document the history of infectious diseases in the past. But this evidence consists of millions of molecular fragments that have to be retrieved and analyzed by palaeobiologists, not historians. How do historians--who are accustomed to working with written documents--learn to assess a new kind of evidence? This essay makes an argument for the value of interdisciplinary dialogue, which can open up new questions and new lines of research even for a pandemic that occurred 1500 years ago.

The essay includes links to the latest historical and scientific work in the field of pre-modern plague studies. The file attached here provides the complete citations. The original essay can be found at this link: https://eidolon.pub/when-numbers-dont-count-56a2b3c3d07.

From the 6th century onwards, plague caused recurring mortality crises in the Western world. Such epidemics had profound biological, cultural, economic and political impacts on European societies. Some aspects of the history of plague epidemics are currently well known, but many questions remain unanswered, such as the precise epidemiological pattern of the disease in ancient times. It is unclear whether plague killed people indiscriminately or whether this disease was selective with respect to age, sex and health. This research contributes to this debate. It consists of an anthropological and paleopathological study of skeletal remains of 1090 individuals, including plague victims from four medieval and post-medieval burial grounds, and individuals from two parochial cemeteries in use during periods of normal mortality. Results from the four plague-related assemblages reveal a peculiar demographic signature. Age and sex distribution differs clearly from what is expected in non-epidemic periods, when it is shown to correspond closely to the demographic structure of the living population. Moreover, the study of various non-specific skeletal stress markers shows that plague victims were in a better health before they passed away than people who died in non-epidemic periods. The results demonstrate that individuals who suffered stress and disease had a reduced chance of survival in non-epidemic periods, whereas they were not at a higher risk to die during plague epidemics. This study provides evidence that plague was not selective, and that it killed regardless of sex, age, and preexisting health.

--

Génératrice depuis le VIe siècle de notre ère de crises épidémiques récurrentes en Occident, la peste a profondément marqué l’histoire des sociétés européennes, tant sur le plan biologique que culturel, économique et politique. Si l’histoire des épidémies qu’elle a engendrées est aujourd’hui relativement bien connue, un certain nombre de questions sur ses caractéristiques épidémiologiques passées demeurent pour partie irrésolues. En particulier, le caractère sélectif ou non de la mortalité par peste à l’égard de l’âge, du sexe et de l’état de santé préexistant des individus fait actuellement débat. À partir d’une approche anthropobiologique, le présent travail se propose de contribuer à cette discussion. Il livre les résultats de l’étude d’un corpus de 1090 squelettes provenant, d’une part, de quatre sites d’inhumation de pestiférés de la fin du Moyen Âge et du début de l’époque moderne et, d’autre part, de deux cimetières paroissiaux médiévaux utilisés hors contexte épidémique. Cette étude révèle en premier lieu l’existence d’une signature démographique commune aux séries en lien avec la peste. Leur composition par âge et par sexe, distincte de celle caractérisant la mortalité naturelle, est au contraire en adéquation avec la structure théorique d’une population vivante préindustrielle. L’examen de divers indicateurs de stress suggère par ailleurs que les victimes de la peste jouissaient, à la veille de leur décès, d’un meilleur état de santé que les individus morts en temps normal. Les résultats obtenus concourent à démontrer que les facteurs causals de ces lésions squelettiques, d’accoutumé responsables d’une diminution des chances de survie, n’eurent au contraire qu’une influence mineure, si ce n’est nulle, sur le risque de mourir de l’infection à Yersinia pestis. Ce travail livre in fine un faisceau d’arguments convergents qui tendent à prouver que les épidémies de peste anciennes furent à l’origine d’une mortalité non sélective, la maladie frappant indistinctement les individus des deux sexes, de tous âges et de toutes conditions sanitaires.

This is a short "Comment" summarizing new work on the origins of the Black Death, the plague pandemic that devastated major parts of Eurasia (and perhaps Africa) in the late Middle Ages. Building on work by paleogeneticists, new historical investigations have explored the timing, location, and likely circumstances of the "Big Bang," the sudden diffusion of plague into new ecological niches at least a century before the recorded Black Death outbreaks. The key finding is that the Big Bang can likely be tied to the emergence of Mongol armies in the early 13th century and their major campaigns into East and Central Asia in subsequent decades. Grain supplies are the most likely mechanism of transmission. In fact, humans' own roles in the genesis of pandemics, including the current coronavirus pandemic we are experiencing now, are likely to remain a key area of investigation in the field of Emerging Infectious Diseases. The essay is published open-access at this link: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(20)30176-2/fulltext.

Extraction of genetic material of the causative organism of plague, Yersinia pestis, from the remains of persons who died during the Black Death has confirmed that pathogen’s role in one of the largest pandemics of human history. This then opens up historical research to investigations based on modern science, which has studied Yersinia pestis from a variety of perspectives, most importantly its evolutionary history and its complex ecology of transmission. The contributors to this special issue argue for the benefits of a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to the many remaining mysteries associated with the plague’s geographical extent, rapid transmission, deadly outcomes, and persistence.

Keywords: Yersinia pestis, Second Plague Pandemic, Afroeurasia, anti-Jewish violence, bioarchaeology, biological anthropology, microbiology, historical method.

This essay introduced the inaugural issue of the newly launched journal, The Medieval Globe. The General editor of the journal is Carol Symes; the guest editor of this volume is Monica H. Green. To access all the individual essays as well as the full volume, go to: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1/.

https://www.letture.org/la-vita-al-tempo-della-peste-misure-restrittive-quarantena-crisi-economica-maria-paola-zanoboni
Dall’antichità ai primi decenni del XVIII secolo le epidemie di peste coinvolsero ovunque tutti i possibili aspetti della vita economica, politica e sociale, con analogie impressionanti : dalla psicosi collettiva, alla caccia ai potenziali untori, alla negazione delle prime avvisaglie del contagio per timore degli effetti economici che avrebbero innescato; alle devastanti conseguenze sul commercio e sull’economia (in primis la “crisi del ‘300”), dovute alle misure restrittive; ai tentativi dei governi di sanare il deficit con prestiti, emissione di titoli del debito pubblico, nuove tasse, e di soccorrere con sussidi i disoccupati; agli assalti ai forni per paura della quarantena. E’ sconcertante come, nonostante i progressi nelle discipline mediche, gli strumenti di prevenzione disponibili ai nostri giorni siano gli stessi elaborati nel ‘300, a partire dal Nord della Penisola (Gian Galeazzo Visconti ne fu uno dei principali ideatori), recepiti tardi dal resto dell’Europa (tardissimo dal’Inghilterra, che li mise in pratica solo alla fine del ‘500, su consiglio dei medici padovani presenti a Londra), e adottati con successo fino al 1720, quando l’ultimo cordone sanitario (a Marsiglia) debellò quasi del tutto il morbo dal Vecchio Continente. Il ricorso a forme di vera e propria “dittatura sanitaria” fu dal ‘300 al ‘700 il metodo comunemente adottato per cercare di far rispettare le misure restrittive. Divieto di accesso e di uscita dalle città colpite, stretta sorveglianza sui movimenti di merci e persone, cordoni sanitari, isolamento, quarantena e “quarantena generale” (ovvero lockdown con modalità identiche a quelle attuali); divieto di assembramento e di ritrovo, chiusura di attività commerciali, taverne, scuole, luoghi di pubblico intrattenimento; cancellazione delle manifestazioni di ogni tipo, comprese le fiere e i mercati; divieto di partecipare a cerimonie religiose, processioni, funerali; “bollette e fedi di sanità” (=passaporti che consentivano la circolazione di persone e merci attestando la provenienza da luoghi non contagiati): questi i provvedimenti sanitari messi in atto a partire dalla metà del ‘300 per prevenire e limitare il contagio.