The Plague
The pomander and the vinegar, the flea and the bacillus.
In the Texts
The Materia Medica carries the plague’s whole pharmacy: the pomander against the foul air, the vinegar of the four thieves, the sealed earth, the theriac, the bezoar, and the amulets of arsenic and of the holy names; the demonologists took the plague among the works that God permits and the devil uses. The treatise of 1622 was written between the plagues of 1575 and 1630 in northern Italy, and Canale’s readers had buried their families.
What Medicine Makes of It
The agent is Yersinia pestis, found by Yersin in 1894, carried by the flea, and confirmed from the London pits by ancient DNA in 2011; Dean (2018) found the human flea and the louse fit the medieval spread better than the rat. It killed a third to a half of Europe in four years. The pomander served the miasma theory, which was wrong about the cause and right about the remedy: the quarantines, lazarettos, and cordons built on it were what worked, and the massacres of the Jews built on the other theory were what did not.
The Evidence
- Ancient DNA from the East Smithfield plague pit in London (Bos et al., 2011) and from Barcelona, Toulouse, and Hereford confirmed Yersinia pestis as the Black Death’s agent and reconstructed its genome; the pathogen was identified by Yersin in Hong Kong in 1894 and the flea route by Simond in 1898.
- The Black Death killed between 30 and 60 per cent of Europe’s population in 1347–51 (Benedictow, 2004); Dean et al. (2018) modelled the second-pandemic outbreaks and found human ectoparasites, lice and the human flea, fit the spread better than rats, which explains why the plague ran through households.
- The pomander and the vinegar served the miasma theory, which was wrong about the cause and sometimes right in effect: the quarantines of Ragusa (1377) and Venice, the lazarettos, and the cordons were the one measure that worked, and they were built on it.
- Cohn (2002) argued the Black Death was not the modern bubonic plague on epidemiological grounds; the DNA settled the agent, and the differences in speed are now assigned to the vectors and to pneumonic spread.
- The massacres of Jews in 1348–49, in Strasbourg, Basel, and two hundred other towns, on the charge of well-poisoning, preceded the plague’s arrival in many of them; Clement VI’s bulls of July and September 1348 forbade them and were ignored. The scapegoat is the disease’s companion, which the AIDS years and the cholera riots show.
Where They Part
The amulets and cordials did nothing; the sanitary measures, drawn from a false theory, did a great deal; and the scapegoating, which the Church forbade and the towns did, is the plague’s companion in every epidemic since.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Bos, K. I., et al. (2011). “A draft genome of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black Death.” Nature 478.
- Dean, K. R., et al. (2018). “Human ectoparasites and the spread of plague in Europe during the Second Pandemic.” PNAS 115.
- Benedictow, O. J. (2004). The Black Death 1346–1353: The Complete History. Boydell.
- Cipolla, C. M. (1992). Miasmas and Disease. Yale.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.