The Gory Details (Gross)

Gory Details #15: "Partying with the Plague Rats"

Kids are great historians. Take "Ring Around The Rosies." What a wonderful history of the plague. Let's review it together.

Line: Ring around the rosies;  Translation: Standing around bodies covered in "rosie" welts.

Line: Pockets full of posies; Translation: Posies were thought to ward off the plague

Line:  Ashes to ashes; Translation: They burned the bodies

Line: We all fall down; Translation: At one point, the plague killed 33% of all people in Europe, more in cities

Good times. Good times. But what if we wanted to write about plagues today? Is there any gory goodness to be drawn from the bubonic plague? You bet. Read on.

What is The Plague: The Plague is a bacterial infection caused by the bite of a flea most commonly found on rats. The weird thing is that the fleas don't actually bite humans that often. Fortunately for gore lovers, there were a lot of fleas in the middle ages.

When did is start and end: No one really knows who first caught the plague. It was first documented in China in the 1330s. It had probably been around longer but really massive plague outbreaks didn't get started until cities became widespread. The plague can kill it's victim in a day meaning they don't have a lot of time to share the germs. It took the cramped, untidy conditions of feudal cities to really get things cooking. The first European plague landed in Sicily in 1347. Plague passed around the world in a series of waves from the 1330s to the 1900s.

It hasn't ended. There are several locations, including the U.S. Southwest where plague rats can still be found and there are several cases of the plague reported to the CDC every year. It doesn't make much news these days because it's treatable and doctors in the Southwest know to look for it. It still kills sometimes in other parts of the world or when some weekend warrior picks up the disease in Arizona and then flies back to Manhattan where they die before anyone can figure out what's wrong.

Is it Gory: You bet! The first sign of plague is usually a sudden, very high fever, this is followed by the swelling of the lymph glands, sometimes to the size of oranges and the eruption of red, chicken pock like spots. Having swollen lymph glands is considered painful by any account but I understand that, with the plague, the glands in the groin could swell to the point that they cut off the circulation to the testes. How 'bout a three day long kick in the balls before you go?

By the time the victim dies within the next day or two, the pox will likely have turned black. (Hence the "Black" plague.) There's also a ton of joy in having bodies lying around in houses and streets. When the plague got around to killing seven or eight out of ten people in a city like Venice, the smell was an art form. Good time to be a dog though. "Fido. Bring grandpa back. Here boy. Bring grandpa."

There are depictions of beggars and servants, still alive against all the odds collecting their masters belongings and setting themselves up as barons in dead cities or riding around on stolen horses cheering the end of the world.

In fact, the cities weren't quite that dead. Rich, or lucky people, fled the cities and lived out those ugly years in secluded villas eating cakes, writing poems about the people they'd left behind and having anyone who came near shot before they could spread the disease.

The Grim Reaper took his current form during this time. He didn't wait around for little Tiimy to wander into traffic in those days. No Sir. He swung The Scythe and landed himself half of London.

What did it do to society: According to organized labor, the plague was great. In the years following the plague of the 1340's there was a tremendous shortage of labor. Serfs, trapped for generations by the fact that there were so many serfs, found their services in short supply. Higher wages were demanded and, in several locations, genuine strikes and protests broke out. Ah riots. I lost some of my best teeth in riots.

What was just weird: There were several weird things about the plague. First of all, in Judaism, there is a ritual house cleaning every year. The law prescribes that every crumb of food must be removed. It should come as no surprise then that there were relatively fewer rats in Jewish houses than in Moorish or Christian houses, therefor there were fewer plague rat flea bites. Many Jewish families seemed virtually immune to the disease.

What do you suppose their neighbors did when they noticed the jews not dying? Did they try to clean their houses? Did they say, "more benefits of clean living?" Not at all. Somehow the Jews not dying was the work of Satan, not good hygiene. They killed the Jews, moved into the Jew's houses and died when things got dirty.

On the flip side of this, the Scotts, who were mostly spared the plague because they were agrarian, decided in the 1600s that the whole affair was God punishing the English. I tried to explain to the officer that the whole "Incident on 10th Street" was God punishing the merge with no blinkerers people but I still had to pay $50 bucks and take this anger management class. What ever!

Also weird is this quote by Boccaccio, writer of "The Decameron" and survivor of the plague. "Once, the rags of a poor man who had just died from the disease were thrown into the public street and were noticed by two pigs, who, following their custom, pressed their snouts into the rags, and afterwards picked them up with their teeth, and shook them against their cheeks: and within a short time, they both began to convulse, and they both, the two of them, fell dead on the ground next to the evil rags."

Wow. So, never mind that the plague takes at least several hours to incubate and may or may not infect pigs, wouldn't it be fun to throw out a rag and send animals into convulsions? Right now I have to use and electric prod.

Well, I'm off to throw my flea circus away and take a bath in Calamine Lotion. Not get out there and write.

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