As ignorance and prejudice helped the plague to kill millions of people.
Plague is firmly entrenched in the history and culture of mankind as a terrible disease that no one could be saved — even the doctors themselves. Moore got into the houses, destroyed families, towns filled with thousands of corpses. Humanity is now a known cause of the disease and its treatment, but in the past doctors were powerless in the face of the Plague. Not helped any knowledge of astrology or the study of ancient treatises written by the ancient authorities.
“the Tape.ru” talks about the pandemics of the plague and how they have forced mankind to think about the true nature of infections.
the Plague is one of the most ancient diseases. Traces of its causative agent — Yersinia pestis was found in teeth of people who lived five thousand years ago, in the bronze age. This bacterium has caused two of the most deadly pandemics in human history, destroying hundreds of millions of people. The disease spread like wildfire, destroying the entire city, and the doctors had nothing to oppose her — in many ways due prejudices and the low level of medical knowledge. Only the invention of antibiotics and vaccines have allowed humanity to defeat the plague, although it is still in various parts of the world, even in developed countries, be flash.
the Disease begins like a cold or the flu: fever, weakness and headache. People do not even suspect that the reason for his malaise became invisible germ bomb — flea, whose insides are clogged with plague bacilli. The insect is forced to regurgitate back into the wound absorbed the blood and the body gets an army of deadly bacteria. If they penetrate to the lymph nodes, the patient develops a bubonic form of the disease. The nodes are greatly swollen. In the Middle ages they burned and pierced — in harm to the patient and those who were near.
Septic form of plague occurs when the plague Bacillus enters the bloodstream, causing intravascular coagulation. Clots break the nutrition of tissues, and neverovskaya the blood, penetrating the skin causes the characteristic rash black.
According to one version, it was due blackening of skin, the plague pandemic in the Middle ages became known as the Black death. The septic plague is rarer than the other forms, however, in the past, the mortality from it reached almost a hundred percent of antibiotics did not yet know.
Finally, pneumonic plague is what distinguished the Black death. During the first pandemic, the Justinian’s plague, almost no mention of hemoptysis, but in the Middle ages, this symptom is also often met as buboes. The bacteria got into his lungs and caused pneumonia, and the patient exhaled plague Bacillus that pop��gave to the respiratory system of other people. During the Black death, the disease was passed from person to person and didn’t need the fleas as the vector.
there are three major pandemics of plague. Justiniana plague that began in 541 ad, killed about a hundred million people around the world for two centuries, and destroyed half of Europe’s population. The black death — the second wave of the disease lasted two decades and claimed the lives, according to various estimates, from one hundred to two hundred million people, making it the most deadly viral pandemic in the history of mankind. From the third pandemic, began in China and lasted about a century (from 1855 to 1960), killed more than ten million people.
History of the plague began ten thousand years ago, when relatively harmless to people, soil bacterium, Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, causing only a slight disorder gastrointestinal tract, acquired several mutations that allow it to colonize the lungs. Then changes in gene Pla made a bacterium highly toxic: she learned to break down proteins in the lungs and multiply throughout the body via the lymphatic system, forming buboes. The same mutation gave her the ability to be transmitted airborne by. As in many cases, the cause of the epidemics have become close contacts between humans and wildlife.
Around four thousand years ago there was a mutation that made the highly virulent Yersinia pestis, can be transmitted through the fleas of rodents, humans and other mammals. Parasitic on mammals blood sucking insects moved long distances together with travelers. Fleas climbed into the baggage and trade goods, so the development trade has become one of the causes of the pandemic. Justiniana plague originated in Central Asia, but shopping channels have entered first to Africa and from there reached the Byzantine Constantinople — populous city and world center of the first Millennium of our era. The bubonic and septicemic forms of the disease at the peak of the epidemic killed five thousand people in a day.
the Black death caused another strain of Yersinia pestis that is not a direct descendant of the causative agent of Justinian’s plague. It is believed that one of the shocks of the pandemic was the Mongol conquest in the XIII century, which caused a decline in trade and agriculture, and then hunger. Played a role, and climate change, as prolonged drought led to mass migration of rodents, including marmots, closer to human settlements. due crowding animals occurred epizootic — an analogue of the epidemic in animals.
As the meat of marmots are considered a delicacy, the spread of the disease among people has become a matter of time.
T��ETA pandemic began with outbreaks of bubonic plague in China in 1855, after which the infection has spread to all continents, except Antarctica. The natural focus is in Yunnan province, which still bears the epidemiological threat. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Chinese began to settle in the area, to enhance the extraction of minerals is experiencing high demand. But this led to close contacts of people with gelegrodan rats, which was inhabited by a plague-infected fleas. Urban population growth and the emergence of a loaded transport routes opened the way for the bubonic Mora. From Hong Kong plague came to British India, which claimed the lives of one million people, and over the next thirty years — 12.5 million.
As with other pandemics, the spread of the plague contributed to the prevailing at that time misconceptions about the nature of infectious diseases. For medieval doctors, the authority of ancient philosophers Hippocrates and Aristotle were undeniable, and the careful study of their writings was mandatory for all those who wanted to connect his life with medicine.
According to the principles of Hippocrates, the disease occurs due natural factors and human lifestyle. At the time, this idea has generally been advanced as to the Hippocratic of the disease, generally considered the results of the intervention of supernatural forces. However, the ancient Greek physician had scant knowledge of anatomy and physiology, therefore thought, that recovery of the patient must be cared for properly so that the body itself is able to cope with the disease.
Medieval doctors, University education was the least experienced in the treatment of diseases, but had high status and respectable. They knew anatomy, and surgery was considered a dirty craft. Religious authorities opposed the autopsy, so in Europe there were very few universities that focused attention on the structure of the human body. The fundamental medical principle was the theory of gomorov, according to which human health depended on the balance of four fluids: blood, lymph, yellow bile and black bile.
most of the medieval physicians-theorists believed in the principle of Aristotle, that the plague was caused by miasma — evaporation making the air bad. Some believed that the miasma formed due unfavourable location of the heavenly bodies, others were blaming the earthquake, the wind from the marshes, nasty odors of manure and rotting corpses. In one of the medical treatises 1365 argued that the plague cannot be cured without knowing the humoral theory and astrology, which are very important for the medical practitioner.
All the preventive measures BorBAA with the plague was to eliminate the poisonous air, which supposedly came from the South. Doctors recommended to build houses with Windows on the North. Also one should avoid the sea coasts, because of the fact that the plague outbreak began in the port cities, did not escape the attention of medical authorities. Only they had no idea that the disease was spread through trade routes, and not hovering in the sea air. In order not to fall ill with plague, the alleged need to hold your breath, breathe through the fabric or burn aromatic herbs. Against disease used perfumes, precious stones and metals, for example gold.
it was thought that the bubonic plague contains a poison that you want to display. They slashed, burned, stabbed sucking the poison the ointment, but released bacteria that could infect others. Despite the fact that doctors have made, as they thought, all the necessary protective measures, many of them died. Others, knowing that their treatment is ineffective, followed his own advice and fled the city, although the plague overtook them and in the distance of the foci. Despite the fact that the plague has demonstrated the complete impotence of the medieval medicine, doctors soon overcame their dependence on the ancient authorities and moved to their own observation and experience.
One of the few effective methods (although with varying degrees of success) was in quarantine, despite the constant protests by freedom-loving citizens and merchants. In Venice was established the deferred entry of ships in port, which lasted for 40 days (the word “quarantine” comes from the Italian quaranta giorni — “forty days”). A similar measure was introduced for people arriving from plague-infested territories. City councils began to employ physicians — the plague doctors — specially for the treatment of the disease, after which they also went to the quarantine.
Because many of the leading theoreticians died due pandemic, the discipline was open to new ideas. University medicine failed, so people have more to turn to practitioners. With the development of surgery, more attention was paid to the direct study of the human body. Medical treatises were translated from Latin into accessible to a wide audience languages that stimulated the revision and development of ideas.
the True cause of the plague — Yersinia pestis, was discovered only a few centuries after the Black death. This has helped spread among the scholars advanced ideas of Louis Pasteur, in the XIX century, changed the views on the causes of many diseases. The scientist, who became the founder of Microbiology was able to prove that infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms, not by miasma and the imbalance of the body, as continued to think lie��Nike, including his teacher and colleague, Claude Bernard. Pasteur developed methods of treatment against anthrax, cholera and rabies, and founded the Pasteur Institute, which henceforth became the centre for the fight against dangerous infections.
Alexander Enikeev
