Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic that occurred in Europe from 1346 to 1353. It was one of the most fatal pandemics in human history; as many as 50 million people [2] perished, perhaps 50% of Europe's 14th century population. [3] The disease is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and spread by fleas and through the air.
Man playing chess with death in a c. 1480 mural by Albertus Pictor in Täby church in Sweden. Much of the most useful manifestations of the Black Death in literature and to historians comes from the accounts of its chroniclers; contemporary accounts are often the only real way to get a sense of the horror of living through a disaster on such a scale.
The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (Simon & Schuster, 2010) Hatcher, John. Plague, Population, and the English Economy, 1348–1530 (1977). Herlihy, David. The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (1997). Hilton, R. H. The English Peasantry in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974) Horrox, Rosemay, ed.
The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic, which reached England in June 1348. It was the first and most severe manifestation of the second pandemic, caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria. The term Black Death was not used until the late 17th century.
[3] [2] The book has also been published in combination with The Black Death in the fourteenth century (1832) and The Sweating Sickness: A medical contribution to the story of the fifteenth and sixteenth century (1834) in a book called The Epidemics of the Middle Ages by doctor August Hirsch in 1865 after Hecker's death.
Guy de Chauliac was born in Chaulhac, Lozère, France, into a family of modest means. [1] He began his study of medicine in Toulouse before going to study in Montpellier, the center for medical knowledge in the 14th century of France.
Any sudden deterioration of health was often blamed on poisoning. Europe was hit by several waves of the Black Death throughout the late Middle Ages. Crowded cities were especially hard hit by the disease, with death tolls as high as 50% of the population. In their distress, emotionally distraught survivors searched desperately for an explanation.
For years it was common for Europeans to assume that the Black Death originated in China. Charles Creighton, in his History of Epidemics in Britain (1891), summarizes the tendency to retrospectively describe the origins of the Black Death in China despite lack of evidence for it: "In that nebulous and unsatisfactory state the old tradition of the Black Death originating in China has remained ...