Six centuries of consensus rolls over in its grave:Everything you know about the Black Death is wrong…
(h/t north of 60)
20 Replies to “The Sound Of Settled Science”
The time also puts this in the depths of the little ice age. The factors cited including malnutrition, poverty, migration patterns, general brutish life can all be attributed to lower temperatures, lower harvests, and increased competition for food. I wish we could send all the A$$hole CAGW alarmists back in time to experience their Nirvana
Europeans were pretty much clueless about the causative agent of the plague (Yersinia Pestis), so they turned to anti-Semitism to explain the mysterious illness. Even though Jews were also dying of the plague and even though Pope Clement VI absolved them of responsibility the bloodthirsty were not convinced. It had to be the Jews. Followers of The Religion of Love (TRoL) blinded by hatred exacted their vengeance on Jews, who were accused of poisoning wells in pursuit of the Final Solution, the extermination of Christians.
Professor Michael Curtis of Rutgers University summed it up perfectly: “Anything and everything is a reason to hate the Jew. Whatever you hate, the Jew is that.”
The black plague was a rank amateur in terms of killing off people.
For real expertise in “human catastrophe” you must look to governments who murdered 300 million people in the last century – untold millions in their petty wars and pogroms for millenia past.
This doesn’t really belong in “The Sound of Settled Science”; more like “Your Moral and Intellectual Superiors”. It was never “settled science” (or history) that the Black Death was caused solely by the bubonic plague; that’s the “everyone thought the world was flat” elementary school textbook corruption. Historians have known for most of the 20th century that the Black Death was caused by a number of different things all intersecting at once, and that the documentary evidence contradicts the theory that it was one single source or pathogen.
“The disease was pneumonic – AND bubonic”
Exactly. I don’t know why these ‘scientists’ today think they always know better than our forefathers did.
Why set up a false dichotomy and say it had to be one or the other when it could easily have been both?
Bubonic plague, the manifestation of infection with Yersinia Pestis has two forms. The “regular” form is alive and well in rat fleas even in the sewers of Vancouver. As long as the rat population remains relatively healthy, the fleas are happy to stay with their regular hosts, the rats. If a major die off of the rats occurs then the fleas go looking for other hosts, and if they’re in close proximity to humans, as they were in Mediaeval Europe, then they’ll bite and thereby infect human beings. This can cause bubonic plague so called because of the “buboes” or pus-filled lymph glands characteristic of the disease. The disease still spreads relatively slowly since it is vector borne (fleas), albeit fast enough to wreak havoc. For reasons still not well understood it can transform to the pneumonic form which is droplet spread at which point it spreads like wildfire. It still manifests itself as “bubonic” plague since the pathogenesis and course of the illness in the human is unchanged but it is spread by droplet i.e. pneumonic plague. For equally obscure reasons, having run its course, it settles back into the “regular” form back with the rat population waiting to re-emerge should circumstances change. Our infectious disease prof lectured us on this in the late ’80s so health care workers and probably most serious historians have known about this for ages. Journalists — not so much.
“Europeans were pretty much clueless about the causative agent of the plague (Yersinia Pestis), so they turned to anti-Semitism to explain the mysterious illness.”
European Christians also couldn’t know that the stricter dietary and ablutions regimen of the Jews (and indeed, Muslims too) actually improved their chances of survival. By dint of their religious practices, Jews were generally more hygienic in their day-to-day lives than other medieval Europeans. Ironically, being shut into ghettoes might also have improved their resistance.
Incidentally, it strikes me that “anti-Semitism” is a relatively modern -ism. By and large, Jews were despised in medieval times not on the basis of race but on the basis of religion; Jews were hated as obstinate old hold-outs clinging to a covenant with God now superseded by the Resurrection; they were “Christ-deniers”. With some exceptions, Jews could usually ameliorate their social status by conversion. Many did.
But conversion offered no escape to Jews under the Nazis because they were viewed as a race; that’s anti-Semitism.
A more appropriate term for the discrimination they faced back then might be “anti-Judaism”.
I don’t know that this is destroying consensus. I was teaching Black Death last night in my Western Civ class, and I emphasized that there was both the flea-borne form and the pneumonic form.
Years ago we were told in biology that it was thought the old nursery rhyme;
Ring around the rosies—-Buboes
Pocket full of posies—–pot purée to ward off sickness
Achoo, Achoo!————-Sneezing,
We all fall down———-Rapid death in the streets
was an ancient throw back to the plague years describing the rapid spread of Pneumonic/bubonic plague
Yeah well, I have always figured that “the plague” was really a manifestation of early “Little Ice Age” climate. Cool damp stormy weather, poor hygiene, poor crops and a weakened malnourished population which would have ( and probably did) succumbed to any infection.
Yersinia Pestis was the spark which ignited a cultural/social/demographic powder keg.
There are many of us who have travelled abroad and have been exposed to Yersinia Pestis, indeed exposure to rats just about any where, yet never got sick. Healthy, clean, well feed individuals
generally have good survival rates.
The British Empire expanded on the strength of the Royal Navy, whose emphasis on nutrician was a important doctrine. “Limeys”?
Humbug, Ms. McMillan, as others have well commented.
I have read, somewhere, that pneumonic plague, if it got going, could kill off a town in 24 hr.
Mortality rates were in excess of 90%.
Archaeologidal remnants of a number of villages have been found in Britain, where the village was wiped out,
either by the plague itself, or by movement after the plague to larger towns and cities. The major cities and
towns in Britain repopulated in about 10 years. It took much longer for the countryside to recover.
Just another bandwagon for the clueless MSM to jump on.
Twenty five skeletons located in a single excavation is most decidedly NOT a valid sample of the plague, diet, violence, living conditions, the weather of the time or pretty near anything else one thinks might be relevant.
The argument that people died from pneumonic, rather than bubonic plague is also somewhat irrelevant. The plague is caused by yersinia pestis and can manifest itself in several ways. A person with infected lungs will exhale plague bearing aerosols, increasing the rate of transmission.
Human behavior patterns of the time were a contributing factor. The Church insisted on regular worship, bringing the majority of the people into close proximity at least once a week. The fleas rejoiced. Jews, Muslims and other elements of the population who were not part of the mainstream did not join these gatherings, and were therefore less likely to be infected.
Despite an understanding of disease transmission several orders of magnitude greater than was present in the mid 1300s, and despite the best in modern medical technology (albeit both tempered by modern liberalism), SARS spread from a single case to over 300 in Toronto, killing nearly 10% of them. A death rate of 90% in the middle ages is completely believable. The perceived lifestyle of the victim is quite beside the point.
Once again, this is science’s strength, not weakness.
The weak-minded are those who continue to believe stuff despite the evidence.
No shock that’s the order of the day on SDA.
Foxtrot Oscar…….
Gee Johnny baby, its so awesome of you to come and educate all us pore iggurant red necks, we shore do appreciate it. Most of us only have a PhD or a lowly MSc to get by with, we needs all the help we can gets.
But I have to tell you John, confidentially, I don’t think you really understand the reason Kate posts these. Joke, I do believe, is on y’all.
Glad you could join us, John. But does your comment have, what used to be referred to as, “a point”?
“The weak-minded are those who continue to believe stuff despite the evidence.”
Keep at it…
DrD, that was very succinct. Thank you.
The vectors of the plague have been known for centuries. There
is no way that some idiot can change history on the basis of
25 skeletons! This is even more absurd than global warming theory.
Science is decided by peer review, not unproven theory based on
meager food for souls forgot. Science is about proof! Without
that you have nothing. It is not about consensus, fads or popular
opinion.
When Albert Einstein fled Nazi Germany, they began a propaganda
against him. They issued a report called 100 authors against
Einstein. When he found out about it, he said: “If I were wrong,
it would only take one.”
Jeez, I love posers!
The time also puts this in the depths of the little ice age. The factors cited including malnutrition, poverty, migration patterns, general brutish life can all be attributed to lower temperatures, lower harvests, and increased competition for food. I wish we could send all the A$$hole CAGW alarmists back in time to experience their Nirvana
Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire
http://www.amazon.ca/Justinians-Flea-First-Plague-Empire-ebook/dp/B000QUEHNA/ref=tmm_kin_title_0
The first plague started in the 640s and set the Mediterranean up for easy conquest by islam. The disease was pneumonic – AND bubonic
Europeans were pretty much clueless about the causative agent of the plague (Yersinia Pestis), so they turned to anti-Semitism to explain the mysterious illness. Even though Jews were also dying of the plague and even though Pope Clement VI absolved them of responsibility the bloodthirsty were not convinced. It had to be the Jews. Followers of The Religion of Love (TRoL) blinded by hatred exacted their vengeance on Jews, who were accused of poisoning wells in pursuit of the Final Solution, the extermination of Christians.
Professor Michael Curtis of Rutgers University summed it up perfectly: “Anything and everything is a reason to hate the Jew. Whatever you hate, the Jew is that.”
The black plague was a rank amateur in terms of killing off people.
For real expertise in “human catastrophe” you must look to governments who murdered 300 million people in the last century – untold millions in their petty wars and pogroms for millenia past.
This doesn’t really belong in “The Sound of Settled Science”; more like “Your Moral and Intellectual Superiors”. It was never “settled science” (or history) that the Black Death was caused solely by the bubonic plague; that’s the “everyone thought the world was flat” elementary school textbook corruption. Historians have known for most of the 20th century that the Black Death was caused by a number of different things all intersecting at once, and that the documentary evidence contradicts the theory that it was one single source or pathogen.
“The disease was pneumonic – AND bubonic”
Exactly. I don’t know why these ‘scientists’ today think they always know better than our forefathers did.
Why set up a false dichotomy and say it had to be one or the other when it could easily have been both?
Bubonic plague, the manifestation of infection with Yersinia Pestis has two forms. The “regular” form is alive and well in rat fleas even in the sewers of Vancouver. As long as the rat population remains relatively healthy, the fleas are happy to stay with their regular hosts, the rats. If a major die off of the rats occurs then the fleas go looking for other hosts, and if they’re in close proximity to humans, as they were in Mediaeval Europe, then they’ll bite and thereby infect human beings. This can cause bubonic plague so called because of the “buboes” or pus-filled lymph glands characteristic of the disease. The disease still spreads relatively slowly since it is vector borne (fleas), albeit fast enough to wreak havoc. For reasons still not well understood it can transform to the pneumonic form which is droplet spread at which point it spreads like wildfire. It still manifests itself as “bubonic” plague since the pathogenesis and course of the illness in the human is unchanged but it is spread by droplet i.e. pneumonic plague. For equally obscure reasons, having run its course, it settles back into the “regular” form back with the rat population waiting to re-emerge should circumstances change. Our infectious disease prof lectured us on this in the late ’80s so health care workers and probably most serious historians have known about this for ages. Journalists — not so much.
“Europeans were pretty much clueless about the causative agent of the plague (Yersinia Pestis), so they turned to anti-Semitism to explain the mysterious illness.”
European Christians also couldn’t know that the stricter dietary and ablutions regimen of the Jews (and indeed, Muslims too) actually improved their chances of survival. By dint of their religious practices, Jews were generally more hygienic in their day-to-day lives than other medieval Europeans. Ironically, being shut into ghettoes might also have improved their resistance.
Incidentally, it strikes me that “anti-Semitism” is a relatively modern -ism. By and large, Jews were despised in medieval times not on the basis of race but on the basis of religion; Jews were hated as obstinate old hold-outs clinging to a covenant with God now superseded by the Resurrection; they were “Christ-deniers”. With some exceptions, Jews could usually ameliorate their social status by conversion. Many did.
But conversion offered no escape to Jews under the Nazis because they were viewed as a race; that’s anti-Semitism.
A more appropriate term for the discrimination they faced back then might be “anti-Judaism”.
I don’t know that this is destroying consensus. I was teaching Black Death last night in my Western Civ class, and I emphasized that there was both the flea-borne form and the pneumonic form.
Years ago we were told in biology that it was thought the old nursery rhyme;
Ring around the rosies—-Buboes
Pocket full of posies—–pot purée to ward off sickness
Achoo, Achoo!————-Sneezing,
We all fall down———-Rapid death in the streets
was an ancient throw back to the plague years describing the rapid spread of Pneumonic/bubonic plague
Yeah well, I have always figured that “the plague” was really a manifestation of early “Little Ice Age” climate. Cool damp stormy weather, poor hygiene, poor crops and a weakened malnourished population which would have ( and probably did) succumbed to any infection.
Yersinia Pestis was the spark which ignited a cultural/social/demographic powder keg.
There are many of us who have travelled abroad and have been exposed to Yersinia Pestis, indeed exposure to rats just about any where, yet never got sick. Healthy, clean, well feed individuals
generally have good survival rates.
The British Empire expanded on the strength of the Royal Navy, whose emphasis on nutrician was a important doctrine. “Limeys”?
Humbug, Ms. McMillan, as others have well commented.
I have read, somewhere, that pneumonic plague, if it got going, could kill off a town in 24 hr.
Mortality rates were in excess of 90%.
Archaeologidal remnants of a number of villages have been found in Britain, where the village was wiped out,
either by the plague itself, or by movement after the plague to larger towns and cities. The major cities and
towns in Britain repopulated in about 10 years. It took much longer for the countryside to recover.
Just another bandwagon for the clueless MSM to jump on.
Twenty five skeletons located in a single excavation is most decidedly NOT a valid sample of the plague, diet, violence, living conditions, the weather of the time or pretty near anything else one thinks might be relevant.
The argument that people died from pneumonic, rather than bubonic plague is also somewhat irrelevant. The plague is caused by yersinia pestis and can manifest itself in several ways. A person with infected lungs will exhale plague bearing aerosols, increasing the rate of transmission.
Human behavior patterns of the time were a contributing factor. The Church insisted on regular worship, bringing the majority of the people into close proximity at least once a week. The fleas rejoiced. Jews, Muslims and other elements of the population who were not part of the mainstream did not join these gatherings, and were therefore less likely to be infected.
Despite an understanding of disease transmission several orders of magnitude greater than was present in the mid 1300s, and despite the best in modern medical technology (albeit both tempered by modern liberalism), SARS spread from a single case to over 300 in Toronto, killing nearly 10% of them. A death rate of 90% in the middle ages is completely believable. The perceived lifestyle of the victim is quite beside the point.
Once again, this is science’s strength, not weakness.
The weak-minded are those who continue to believe stuff despite the evidence.
No shock that’s the order of the day on SDA.
Foxtrot Oscar…….
Gee Johnny baby, its so awesome of you to come and educate all us pore iggurant red necks, we shore do appreciate it. Most of us only have a PhD or a lowly MSc to get by with, we needs all the help we can gets.
But I have to tell you John, confidentially, I don’t think you really understand the reason Kate posts these. Joke, I do believe, is on y’all.
Glad you could join us, John. But does your comment have, what used to be referred to as, “a point”?
“The weak-minded are those who continue to believe stuff despite the evidence.”
Keep at it…
DrD, that was very succinct. Thank you.
The vectors of the plague have been known for centuries. There
is no way that some idiot can change history on the basis of
25 skeletons! This is even more absurd than global warming theory.
Science is decided by peer review, not unproven theory based on
meager food for souls forgot. Science is about proof! Without
that you have nothing. It is not about consensus, fads or popular
opinion.
When Albert Einstein fled Nazi Germany, they began a propaganda
against him. They issued a report called 100 authors against
Einstein. When he found out about it, he said: “If I were wrong,
it would only take one.”
Jeez, I love posers!