Tag Archives: Black Death

10/11/12

The Black Death in Wales

The Black Death is generally understood to have been caused by the flea on a rat that appeared in Europe from Asia, having come from the steppes.  The Black Death came in three forms:  bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic, all caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis.    These three forms had a mortality rate of 30-75%, 90-95%, and 100% respectively.

http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/Black.html

Skip Knox writes:  ‘The Black Death erupted in the Gobi Desert in the late 1320s. No one really knows why. The plague bacillus was alive and active long before that; indeed Europe itself had suffered an epidemic in the 6th century. But the disease had lain relatively dormant in the succeeding centuries. We know that the climate of Earth began to cool in the 14th century, and perhaps this so-called little Ice Age had something to do with it.  Whatever the reason, we know that the outbreak began there and spread outward. While it did go west, it spread in every direction, and the Asian nations suffered as cruelly as anywhere. In China, for example, the population dropped from around 125 million to 90 million over the course of the 14thc.’

While the Black Death arrived in Italy in 1347, it didn’t reach Wales until early 1348 or 1349, probably carried from southern England.  In general, the best guess is that the plague killed 1/3 the population of Europe, and there is no reason to think Wales was any different, except that it was more rural, still, than much of Europe.  The weather had grown colder in the last 100 years, however, and with the pressure of the English conquest and the subsequent altered social makeup of Wales, more displacement and death may have occurred there than in other places.

The following is a map of the spread of the plague:  http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/Path.html 

Mike Ibeji writes:  ‘The plague in Wales and the Marches were as pitiless as elsewhere. At Whitchurch, an inquest into the death of one John le Strange revealed that John had died on 20th August 1349. His oldest son, Fulk, died 2 days before the inquest could be held on 30th August. Before an inquest could be held on Fulk’s estate, his brother Humphrey was dead too. John, the third brother, survived to inherit a shattered estate, in which the 3 water mills which belonged to him were assessed at only half their value ‘by reason of the want of those grinding, on account of the pestilence.’ His land was deemed worthless because all its tenants were dead ‘and no-one is willing to hire the land.’

Jean Geuthin, a Welsh poet who himself was dead by 1349 wrote at the time:  ‘We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy or fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling in the arm-pit; it is seething, terrible, wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried under the arms, a painful angry knob, a white lump. It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion, a small boil that spares no-one. Great is its seething, like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of an ashy colour. It is an ugly eruption that comes with unseemly haste. It is a grievous ornament that breaks out in a rash. The early ornaments of black death.’

06/19/11

Mortality Rates

One of the hard things about imagining oneself in the middle ages, or writing a character who lives then, is figuring out the odds of them living at all.  The median lifespan of an individual living in the US was 78.7 years in 2004.  http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met_y=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:USA&dl=en&hl=en&q=life+span+us

I’ve posted before about life expectancy in the Middle ages (http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/?p=453 and http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/?p=115), indicating that among the elite, both men and women–if they survived childhood–couldn’t reasonably expect to live out of their forties.  Some people did, but what were the mechanisms that kept mortality high?

“Mortality rate is a measure of the number of deaths (in general, or due to a specific cause) in some population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit time. Mortality rate is typically expressed in units of deaths per 1000 individuals per year; thus, a mortality rate of 9.5 in a population of 100,000 would mean 950 deaths per year in that entire population, or 0.95% out of the total.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate

Some of the more immediate causes of early death are war, maternal mortality, and disease.

War:  War wasn’t necessarily more common in the middle ages, if the 20th and 21st centuries are anything to go by.  At the same time, it’s been over 100 years since a war took place within the borders of the United States.   One of the cruelties of war is that if it occurs on farmland and in villages, crops can’t be sown and people starve.  They might not die from battle itself, but they die from its repercussions.  From my reading of the Chronicle of the Princes, war in some measure was nearly constant, up through the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd in 1282 and beyond (because then Welshmen were recruited to fight in Edward’s war against Scotland).

Childbirth:  In fifteenth century in Florence, the best estimate for maternal mortality is 14.4 deaths per 1000 births, which 1.44%–so actually pretty rare.  http://tinyurl.com/43f27bk

This is compared to the U.S. maternal mortality rate of 13 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2004, or .013%http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20427256/ns/health-pregnancy/t/more-us-women-dying-childbirth/

Other sources state:  “Studies by Roger Schofield, B. M. Wilmott Dobbie, and Irvine Loudon estimate that maternal mortality rates between 1400 and 1800 were between 1 and 3 percent. Most often, women died in childbirth due to protracted labor caused by a narrow or deformed pelvis, fetal malpresentation, postpartum hemorrhage, or puerperal fevers. The health risk was renewed at each pregnancy. Since a woman averaged five pregnancies, 10 percent of these women died during or soon after childbirth.”  http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Me-Pa/Obstetrics-and-Midwifery.html

Diseases such as the Black Death:

“Credible death rates  between one quarter and three quarters complicate reaching a Europe—wide  figure. Neither a casual and unscientific averaging of available estimates to  arrive at a probably misleading composite death rate nor a timid placing of  mortality somewhere between one and two thirds is especially illuminating.  Scholars confronting the problem’s complexity before venturing estimates once  favored one third as a reasonable aggregate death rate. Since the early 1970s  demographers have found higher levels of mortality plausible and European  mortality of one half is considered defensible, a figure not too distant from less  fanciful contemporary observations.”  http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/Routt.Black.Death

 

01/30/11

Medieval Diseases

In the Middle Ages, the range of types of diseases was similar to what we experience today, with some exceptions (HIV/AIDS).   Viruses, of course, are no easier to combat now than then, but without vaccines and if the infected person was living in unclean or freezing conditions, or suffering from a poor diet, the disease was made that much worse.  Antibiotics help with some diseases, but then again, more have sprung up in response to them (C-diff).

That said, these are some of the most common diseases people experienced in Europe in the Middle Ages (not including the Black Plague, see:  http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/?p=1000; or leprosy, see:  http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/?p=223)

Dysentary:  Still common in poorer countries today, Dysentary is an infection caused either by bacteria or amoebas, spread through contamination of food and water by infected fecal matter.  Typhoid is another such disease spread through bacteria and fecal matter which was not uncommon in the Middle Ages

“Symptoms: (Bacillary) After 1-6 days incubation, watery stools, fever, cramps, dehydration. In advanced stages, bloody stools, meningitis, conjunctivitis, and arthritis. (Amebic) Acute form: watery, bloody stools, cramps, fever, weakness. Chronic form: intermittent diarrhea, mild abdominal discomfort.  Result: Generally weakened condition.  Note: Endemic in medieval armies and pretty common in cities. Infantile diarrhea was a leading cause of death for infants. After the Black Death, many urban areas instituted public health reforms to improve sanitation and prevent these enteric fevers.”  http://www.labelle.org/top_diseases.html

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Ergotism (“St. Anthony’s fire,” “holy fire,” “evil fire,” “devil’s fire,” “saints’ fire”):  Poisoning from a fungal infection of grain, especially rye.

Symptoms: (Convulsive) Degeneration of the nervous system causes anxiety, vertigo, aural/visual hallucinations, and the sensation of being bitten or burned; stupor, convulsions, and psychosis. (Gangrenous) Constriction of the blood vessels causes reddening and blistering of skin, then blackening, with itching and burning, and finally necrosis.  Result: 40% mortality. Lingering symptoms, including mental impairment, among survivors.

Note: Ergotism was known as a rural disease, particularly of marshy areas, and one that followed crop damage or famine; especially after a severe winter and a rainy spring. Children are more susceptible because of their smaller body weight. Because England did not rely on rye as much as populations on the continent, it suffered fewer cases of the convulsive type.”  http://www.labelle.org/top_diseases.html

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Sexually Transmitted Diseases (Gonorrhea, Syphilis): 

“By the Middle Ages both gonorrhoea and syphilis were widespread. One view, by no means unchallenged, was that syphilis was brought to Europe by Christopher Columbus’ sailors on their return from the New World. The differentiation of the 2 diseases from each other was often a matter of medical debate, from the sixteenth up until the nineteenth century, many authors believing that the symptoms of gonorrhoea (clap or gleet) were the early stages of syphilis (the pox). This view was substantiated by the British surgeon John Hunter (1728-93), who undertook heroic self-experimentation by injecting his own penis with material taken from a patient with gonorrhoea. On developing the signs of syphilis he concluded the two infections were the same — little realizing that his patient, like many others, actually suffered from both infections at the same time. 
The main orthodox treatment for syphilis from the Middle Ages until the early years of the twentieth century consisted of the application of a mercury ointment, a favourite treatment for skin lesions. But sufferers from the disease were particularly susceptible to the blandishments of quacks and charlatans, and many successful businesses profited during the seventeenth through to the twentieth centuries from selling useless remedies.”  http://www.answers.com/topic/sexually-transmitted-diseases-a-brief-history
This article http://www.spectroscopynow.com/coi/cda/detail.cda?id=18699&type=Feature&chId=4&page=1 details the discovery of medical mercury found in medieval bones.  In these cases, it was used primarily to treat syphilis and leprosy.
 
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Diptheria:  “Diphtheria is a highly contagious and potentially life-threatening bacterial disease caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae. There are two types of diphtheria: respiratory and cutaneous. Respiratory diphtheria involves the nose, throat and tonsils, and cutaneous diphtheria involves the skin . . . Death occurs in approximately five to ten percent of all respiratory cases with higher death rates (of up to 20 percent) among persons younger than five and older than 40 years of age.”  http://www.health.state.ny.us/diseases/communicable/diphtheria/fact_sheet.htm

“In the early part of the 14th century there were outbreaks of typhoid fever, dysentery and diphtheria. It has been estimated that in 1316 about 10% of the population died from these three diseases.”  http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/YALDdisease.htm