The Black Death

The work of William McNeill “Plague and People” is an attempt to explain the past through a sort of biological means. It is in some way an explanation of historical event by taking a look at the influence of nature. McNeill is a naturalist and that he considers the environment as a big factor in history. It’s a naturalistic approach to the study of history. If we examine closely the work of McNeill, we might be able to get the idea that human beings and the history of humans is in a way related to the environment and that we play a role.


The Black Death is one example of how a civilization or a society can be swept away by an epidemic. If McNeill’s argument is correct, a certain society will adapt to it but certain parts of the population will definitely be gone. It had caused millions of death. The Black Death seems to have arisen somewhere in Asia and was brought to Europe from the Genoese trading station of Kaffa in the Crimea (in the Black Sea). The story goes that the Mongols were besieging Kaffa when a sickness broke out among their forces and compelled them to abandon the siege. The Mongol commander loaded a few of the sick dead onto his catapults and hurled them into the town. Some of the merchants left Kaffa for Constantinople as soon as the Mongols had departed, and they carried the plague with them. It spread from Constantinople along the trade routes, causing tremendous mortality along the way.


The disease was transmitted primarily by fleas and rats. The stomachs of the fleas were infected with bacteria known as Y. Pestis. The bacteria would block the "throat" of an infected flea so that no blood could reach its stomach, and it grew ravenous since it was starving to death. It would attempt to suck up blood from its victim, only to transfer it back into its prey's bloodstreams. The blood it injected back, however, was now mixed with Y. Pestis. Infected fleas infected rats in this fashion, and the other fleas infesting those rats were soon infected by their host's blood. They then spread the disease to other rats, from which other fleas were infected, and so on. As their rodent hosts died out, the fleas migrated to the bodies of humans and infected them in the same fashion as they had the rats, and so the plague spread. The disease appeared in three forms:bubonic [infection of the lymph system -- 60% fatal]; pneumonic which can be through a respiratory infection -- about 100% fatal], and septicaemic which the infection of the blood and probably 100% fatal].

The plague lasted in each area only about a year, but a third of a district's population would die during that period. People tried to protect themselves by carrying little bags filled with crushed herbs and flowers over their noses, but to little effect. Those individuals infected with bubonic would experience great swellings ("bubos" in the Latin of the times) of their lymph glands and take to their beds. Those with septicaemic would die quickly, before any obvious symptoms had appeared. Those with respiratory also died quickly, but not before developing evident symptoms: a sudden fever that turned the face a dark rose color, a sudden attack of sneezing, followed by coughing, coughing up blood, and death. The disease finally played out in Scandinavia in about 1351but another wave of the disease came in 1365 and several times after that until -- for some unknown reason -- the Black Death weakened and was replaced by waves of typhoid fever, typhus, or cholera. Europe continued to experience regular waves of such mortality until the mid-19th century.

What did the society do the control the plague and how has it affected the population? The effects of that plague and its successors on the men and women of medieval Europe were profound: new attitudes toward death, the value of life, and of one's self. It kindled a growth of class conflict, a loss of respect for the Church, and the emergence of a new pietism (personal spirituality) that profoundly altered European attitudes toward religion. Still another effect, however, was to kindle a new cultural vigor in Europe, one in which the national languages, rather than Latin, were the vehicle of expression.

These were natural disasters, but they were made all the worse by the inability of the directing elements of society, the princes and clergy, to offer any leadership during these crises. In the next few lectures we will examine the reasons for their failure to do so. The 14th century became an era of catastrophes. Some of them man-made, such as the Hundred Years' War and the Great Schism. These were caused by human beings. But the Black Death caused millions of deaths, and had in its way demonstrated a dramatic fashion the existence of new vulnerabilities in Western European society. The plague subjected the population of medieval Europe to tremendous strains, leading many people to challenge old institutions and doubt traditional values, and, by so doing, these calamities altered the path of European development in many areas.

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Sources:

Black Death. Retrieved October 20, 2008 from http://www.wikipedia.com/black death

Great famine. Retrieved October 20, 2008 from ttp://www.vlib.us/medieval/lectures/black_death

McNeill, W.H. (1998). Plagues and peoples. New York: Anchor Books.

PLagues and People

The work of William McNeill “Plague and People” is an attempt to explain the past through a sort of biological means. It is in some way an explanation of historical event by taking a look at the influence of nature. McNeill is a naturalist and that he considers the environment as a big factor in history. It’s a naturalistic approach to the study of history. If we examine closely the work of McNeill, we might be able to get the idea that human beings and the history of humans is in a way related to the environment and that we play a role. There is a sort of ecological niche that we are to find. Humans play a link between environments. There is a continuum or a series of things that humans should play his part so as not to break the series. From this, we will find that even the littlest of the organisms like the parasites play a role. These parasites that live off another organism are related to humans. This relationship is a balance between the micro and macro parasitism that humans tend to work in between. Let us take a look between the so-called macro and micro parasitism


Micro parasitism according to McNeill (1998) is an organism that is a parasite on us. This might include organisms that are inside us feeding on the nutrients that we are taking in. Macro parasitism on the other hand is when we talk about parasitism in a very large scale. In history, it might mean the physical or feeding in some way like abuse of authority to gain more. That is parasitism. But there should always be an equilibrium or balance. Parasites who have had enough that the host is destroyed or can no longer provide would mean destruction or even death. The parasite then will die off. McNeill means this in history to be that sort of abuse that can destroy a society. This became an epidemic because it came to a point that the host is destroyed. On the other hand, if it is just stable we call it endemic.


Humans can be considered the greatest parasite. We have the knowledge that we can think of ways to destroy and hunt even the fiercest creatures that thrive on earth. From the beginning man has been a threat to every species that ever existed. Even to their kind. Man has been ruling since the beginning and it has destroyed quite a number of species along with it are the parasites that live within those species. But what about those parasites that can live on those that humans need for survival and thus humans took care off? We destroyed a great number of small animals to do farming and in so doing killing some plants and animals that once live in the unplowed land.


The growth of population has a lot to do with trying to balance the ecosystem. There are three things that would result from the growth. First is are diseases because the population expands and there are more hosts; second would be war due to conflicts and third would have to be famine because the society was able to consume too much to the point that the ecosystem can no longer provide nourishment. McNeill sees the relationship between these diseases, famine and war to the society. History has given us quite a number of examples of societies that disintegrated because of disease, famine and war. From these, we can say that a society can likely be affected by whatever is happening to the ecosystem. A certain disease can kill off an entire population. Trade and foreign relations of the ancient times had introduced to a certain place a disease unknowingly. What we learned from this epidemic is that human beings tend to adapt to it and battle it out. The method of quarantine would have to be the simplest way that humans battle out the spread of a disease. The advent of these diseases also caused much attention to religion and some belief. We find mystical religious movements that boast of healing.

What McNeill is trying to say is that if there is a sort of an unbalance in the society, it dies off. It can be due to the relationship between the players of the people of the community or a naturalistic approach to it; something might have happened that human beings were not able to react to it. The advent of the diseases upon a shore may sometime affect the delicate balance. Humans are sometimes caught in the middle of an epidemic that no matter how much we try to console it, we are caught by the fact that it is not in our hands anymore. A disease (viral or bacterial) that kills its victims before they can spread it to others tends to flare up and then die out, like a fire running out of fuel. A more resilient disease would establish an equilibrium, its victims living well beyond infection to further spread the disease. This function of the evolutionary process selects against quick lethality, with the most immediately fatal diseases being the most short-lived. Thus both diseases and populations tend to evolve towards an equilibrium in which the common diseases are non-symptomatic, mild, or manageably chronic. When a population that has been relatively isolated is exposed to new diseases, it has no inborn resistance to the new diseases (the population is "biologically naïve"); this body of people succumbs at a much higher rate, resulting in what is known as a "virgin soil" epidemic.

Civilizations thrive and flourish because of this balance. Some may die off because of parasitism within themselves or as a relationship to other beings. McNeill sees the natural method of things that influence history. I might agree with him. Humans have always been in complete struggle of controlling the environment but there are some things that he just might not be able to over turn. History is indeed a balance between all the factors of the society and there should be a relationship established amongst them.

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Sources:

McNeill, W.H. (1998). Plagues and peoples. New York: Anchor Books.

Staloff, Darren (2000) “The search for a meaningful past,philosophies,theories, and
interpretation of human history”. New York: The Teaching Company

population history. Retrieved October 20, 2008 from http://www.wikipedia.com/population