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A historian’s perspective on plagues
In case you're interested further, here's a medical paper on the Plague of Athens. They did find one clearly identifiable grave for plague victims, so they're testing the bones. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19787658 What was Plague like, generally? Thucydides described a violent disease that nearly always killed its victims (he himself survived). It began suddenly, with violent pain and high fever. Within hours, victims broke out in sores. They coughed and retched; they had diarrhea and bled. They had spasms of pain or seizure. In some plagues, skin died, becoming black. The Plague of Athens took up to a week to kill someone, while some later plagues, including the Black Death of 1347, killed in as little as 8 hours. Plague was simply the most frightening thing in the world. It’s no accident that Plague is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Revelation. Diseases that rise to the label of Plague attack nearly all body systems at once. They mutate even as they spread, becoming airborne and sometimes defying logic as to how they are transmitted. The amazing thing is that plagues never kill everyone, although there appears to be no reason why they shouldn’t. When we contemplate the horrors of a 60% death rate, which is about the maximum ever suffered in a plague, we must remember that this means 2 out of 5 people never got sick, or were mildly sick and recovered. Their natural resistance to the disease is what eventually ends the plague, since after it returns several times, a majority of survivors have immunity.
Posted by: trailing wife 2020-03-01 |
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