Medieval Misconceptions: THE BLACK DEATH, one of the worst pandemics of history

[Music] greatings i'm shada and even considering the difficulties we face in the modern day are actually living in an unprecedented time of prosperity and when you look at those of us who are lucky to live in first world countries even the hardest of our modern-day times is still orders of magnitude better than the best times of the past certain times in the past and when you look at some of the worst times of the past it is shocking like truly and it has caused me to you honestly feel very lucky and blessed and this is actually the subject of this video we're going to be looking at one of the worst times the past in fact some people say the greatest catastrophe that's ever or fallen you know a society of people and that is the Black Death and I tell you what when researching this video I have been struck with such an overwhelming measure of a sense a feeling of gratitude for the time I get to live in and the luxuries I get to enjoy and before we dive into the Black Death I do want to actually talk about one of my favorite luxuries of the modern day and that is audible and they're doing something that's honestly really brilliant to help out those of us who stuck at home and need something to help occupy us audible has launched something called audible stories and you can find them by going to stories audible.com where they have made available hundreds of audiobooks absolutely for free just right there there's no strings attached there you don't need to sign up you don't need a login you don't need to pay a cent you just go do story it's not audible.com and you can stream listened to a selection of brilliant audiobooks absolutely for free and I think that's just wonderful obviously now in addition to that regularly when you go to say www m /a diversity or if you're in the u.s. you text chat adversity in the 500 500 their standard deal is that you can get your first audio book for free if you sign up to give them a try for a month and in addition to that first free audiobook you we get to audible originals which is an audiobook only available on audible and you get them for free what audible are doing now is opening up their selection of audible originals so you've got the first audiobook plus all the originals okay access to them all to help people out pass the time during these difficult times and if you are wondering which free audiobook you should grab I would suggest my own audio book chronicles of ever fall shadow of the Conqueror it's a dark epic fantasy even though it's fantasy it deals with some of the brutal realities that happen from the choices at humans you know have made in the past so if you like a dark challenging fantasy I do recommend it and you can grab that very audio book and access to hours and hours of entertainment if you just go to www.extracareanimalhospital.net as I begin pointing out some of the misconceptions of the Black Death and getting into the facts of what it was what happened I would ask you to just bear with me if I get emotional I don't know if I will but when researching this video I did get emotional and so that might come back and it really got to me the reason being is that the more I learn of the past the more real the people of the past have become because far from being statistics facts I found them to be people so similar to me they had similar hopes dreams and desires they wanted the best for themselves their families their loved ones their children and they worked to improve the world even if that's improving their own condition that was working to improve the world and they had to enjoy like I'm so lucky and the things that they had to get go through for what I take is such basic some people even consider right it's a right to have these luxuries they had to work pretty darn hard to just obtain heat in my home I can press a button and warm my home I don't need to break my back collecting firewood and keeping a fire burning all the time I can have hot water on demand instantly whenever I want I don't need to prepare anything for it I can bring light into my home with a flick of a switch I have access to healthy tasty plentiful food just by going down the street and getting it whenever I want for the most part ok difficulties can arrive but that is the kind of standard we try and achieve in the modern day when I get an infection I don't need to worry about dying and when pandemic hits I don't need to worry about my family time or having to struggle with the decision that I might need to abandon them just to survive this is how lucky we are in the modern day these are some of the horrors that people had twins you are but they endured it to try and better their own life and better the lives of their children and this is the thing that can get to me we are their children ultimately they did this for us their descendants and even with the difficulties that exists in the modern day we are still so blessed and we are positioned to endure it and survive is so much better thanks to him so what was the Black Death it was a plague one of the things that people don't actually understand is that there were several pandemics of the bubonic plague okay the black death was actually the worst case of it but the bubonic plague has arisen multiple times throughout the past sometimes much closer to the modern day than you would expect but the black death specifically was the worst case of it and by far the most devastating they've actually been three identified plague pandemics and the first one arose about in the sixth century AD second the Black Death as I mentioned the worst and it was kind of like aftershocks of the Black Death of it arising in smaller pockets after their massive wave with such a huge death toll but that is kind of all counted within the event known as the Black Death the third case of the plague pandemic was actually in Asia in 1890 and that one is actually where some of the misconceptions actually arise specifically in how it was spread but more on that later the Black Death arrived in Europe in 1347 and would quickly spread across all of Europe and would only come under a measure of control after a catastrophic loss of life by 1352 it took five years for this plague pandemic to run its course one historian has dubbed it Magna mortalities for the sheer number of dead one observer wrote that there was scarcely enough living to bury the dead an Augustinian monk named Henry Nitin wrote this about the Black Death there was a general mortality throughout the world sheep and oxen strayed through the fields and among the crops and there was none to drive them off or collect them but they perished in uncounted numbers for lack of shepherds after the pestilence many buildings fell into a total ruin for lack of inhabitants similarly many small villages and hamlets became desolate for all those who dwelt in them had died what was the percentage of dead in the Black Death and this is the staggering thing I want you to try and comprehend and process this number it was 60% of the population reduced from 80 million to 30 million an estimated 50 million deaths to put this into perspective world war ii had a staggering casualty rate but on a percentage scale it's not even a fraction close to the scale that happened in the Black Death so in world war ii an estimated 75 to 80 million deaths which is unbelievable I'm not trying to downplay it yet out of all the come trees that were involved in World War two ultimately that accounted for three to three point seven percent of the population of the time we're talking about a loss in life for their population of medieval Europe of sixty percent that is worse than the fan of snap from marvel in game infinity war and in game think about this think about over half of the people in your immediate circle dying that's like worse than a nose snap just to put it in perspective you need to understand that this wasn't a uniform dispersion there were pockets of much higher death much lower deaths as the account from the Henry night scene just mentioned there were cases of whole communities just dying completely completely wiped out and there are some cases of communities that were very secluded and survived it without a single death and then it all kind of bounces out to where we reach this 60% figure but think about there are cases of entire communities where everyone died it's astounding and staggering and I could only imagine how horrifying that would be because these are people in a much different situation than us they had very poor medical technology in the time more on that later even with the staggering amount of life lost a medieval society in some ways were better equipped to weather such a loss of life than we are in the modern day in the modern day we are much better equipped to prevent the loss of life in the first place so I'm not sure we could say that you know it would be better to be in the medieval period but if we lost that amount of life in the modern day our current society would collapse because our production chains have far more bottlenecks than in the medieval period people of that time were actually far more independent and capable of supporting themselves then we are ok they knew how to grow their food how to look after themselves much better than we do if we lost the supply chains to our supermarkets and electricity and gas ceased coming to our homes it would be a staggering amount of chaos of the likes that we have never seen so that's one interesting kind of thing to compare about the medieval period that day even with the loss of life even with how devastating it was they were able to ultimately recover took a long time of course but they were able to continue on and on this note of kind of comparing a modern day to the past the bubonic plague of the Black Death spread a bit slower than what we see pandemic spread in the modern day the world is far more connected in the modern day and we see diseases jump continents instantly because of flight and other things it took about a year for the bubonic plague to spread across Europe from the places in which it first kind of appeared which is like Italy and southern Eastern Europe and stuff all the way across to Britain barely a year's time but then it lasted for five years having a massive death toll so how did it spread specifically and this is where we have one of the biggest misconceptions about the Black Plague and that is the assumption that it was spread by the fleas on the rats there's actually you know when people have looked into this and studied in detail there's no evidence for it but there is evidence for a later plague and that is being applied too broadly and assumed to have been the case for the medieval Black Death when actually in fact it's not no correlation has been found in the population of rats or reports of rat epidemics or other similar rodents during the time of the Black Death and such a thing would have been made note of that there were rats everywhere because an interesting correlating thing does appear in the third pandemic of the plague okay so remember there's like three main ones in the third one play cases and deaths actually followed the same seasonal fertility cycle of certain species of rat fleas that's where the correlation was found and that's you know the connection there but like I said know such correlation exists with a medieval Black Plague and in addition there are correlating reports in later cases of the plague of rat Falls think about what that word implies rat Falls okay that's the number of rats were kind of talking about that correlate to when they're the main culprit of spreading the plague and there these are reports from Africa also China and they come from around the 18th century so a rat fall kind of event like that would be very notable to observe and you'd think someone would have you know made a record of it if such you know an event a scene like that befell someone in the medieval period but there's no account of that ever happening so unfortunately that video game our plagues tale with rats everywhere is not historical I mean what's fine for you know a fictional video again but historically that wasn't the case how did the medieval plague then spread and we're gonna read this one because there's some specific wording actually seems to be the case that the medieval bubonic plague was actually spread with the combined interplay between two bubonic pneumonic and set to see emic plagues which caused it spread to travel much faster than if it was limited to the migration patterns of rats and so we're actually seeing here because the thing I mean rats you know yes they migrated but not particularly fast okay and on the medieval scale having a pandemic like this spread across an entire continent in this time of a year is relatively fast in comparison and it wouldn't have been spread that fast if it was carried by rats so it was actually spread through a very virulent version of the plague that had interplay and possibly even certain mutations with other types of you know strains of you know sicknesses and plague as well which caused it to be far more catchy unfortunately and once again that was the interplay between the bubonic the pneumonic and set to see amick plagues SARS pretty vicious so this is the other thing that helps dispel the idea that rats were the ones that proliferated the spread of the plague and it is that the spread of the plague or rate in which spread can be charted somewhat to about one mile a day but in some cases up to eight miles a day and the other thing is once rats migrate and find a place where they're happy they stay they they stop moving but the plague continued to spread at a mile a day and you need to understand medieval people didn't read know especially at first what causes it okay they're ultimately they did resort to strict quarantine in actual fact one of the assumptions in what they believed spread the plague was in foul smell now via miasmic kind of theory of sicknesses which is what ultimately is miasma is the idea that foul smell spreads sickness got far more developed later on and in the medieval period it was an idea and they did enact certain countermeasures to fight against bad smells in 1349 Edward the third of England wrote to the mayor of London and he ordered the streets of London to be cleaned and this was his quote the streets were fair with human feces and the air of the city poisoned to the great danger of men passing especially in this time of infectious disease and so that is again the idea that horrible smells carry disease and this is when we come to another misconception of the Black Plague and that is the plague mask that is very distinctive and iconic and associated with the black peg plague but this is the thing those plague masks didn't exist during the Black Plague they're from the Renaissance later all right now the logic behind these plague masks is actually tied with the miasmic theory of medicine which is in bad smells and so the whole purpose of his long nose was to put nice smelling scented herbs spices and other things in that nose cavity so they could breathe in sweet you know fresh nice smelling kind of fumes to protect them from the foul fumes that carried disease so it's tied with that theory but the master themselves didn't exist in the medieval period they come from the doctors of the 17th 18th and 19th centuries and it's just interesting to note that pockets of the plague did you know up here during you know later but not to the huge scale of the Black Plague for a very significant reason which I'll go into when I start to describe how they overcame it because once they overcame it well there was a bit more resistance to it because most people are died but anyway more on that later so one other you know point of evidence which dispels the rack myth is that there were some cities that were pretty big hubs of trade and commerce which would have had a very high rat population in comparison with which actually survived fairly will mostly unscathed from cases of the plague and these are the cities of Milan and do do a horrible of pronouncing these yeah that's in Flanders they actually survived the length of the Black Death nealy unscathed so yeah if the rats were the ones carrying this with people bringing trade goods in and out with rats coming in with them and things like that it would have hit these areas pretty severely but it didn't in terms of remedies and ways to treat it most of it was just hokum okay and there's actually an account from Chaucer that says many a doctor earned a pretty penny by peddling you know Heuer so-called cures or remedies and stuff but more often than not the actual doctors of the time period weren't there to treat the disease because if they're being honest they didn't have anything they mean you could treat it and now mainly they're to just record the deaths the most iconic symptom of the Black Plague are swellings which can so you know look like either markings on the skin or growing kind of bulbous nodules almost and these nodules can look like you know swollen where he fleshy lumps oftentimes appearing black or partially black and they can grow from the size of grape to the size of say an egg and commonly appearing around their neck armpits and groin but sometimes just across the whole body accompanying these swellings are feelings of lethargy okay so low energy you feel horribly sick of course your whole body aching a feeling of cold yet at the same time you would have a really high fever and you would cough up bladder so it's horri it's horrifying it's terrible like this is just a vicious horrible disease and when people contracted it they could die in a couple of hours depending on the strain I can imagine that the more common rate of death would be within a day to five days of contracting the disease you I can only imagine how terrifying it would be because some people could survive it very few but for the most part it was a death sentence if you contracted the Black Death chances were you were going to die and you could die in a couple of hours and unless you were one of the lucky few to survive a couple of days so the other thing about this is how virulent the spread was so someone had it this disease and you were in proximity to them it was a very high chance unless you were miraculously amoreena you would catch it too with the Black Death specifically it affected all the society okay whether you are rich merchants peasants Kings clergy and hit everyone if you were in proximity you could catch it how did people deal with the Black Death and this is where things can be really really rough because they didn't know how to treat it and chances were very high chances if you contracted it you would die so what choices did people have heavy quarantine was practiced in many regions and their quarantine period forty days sometimes it kind of started to get lower and lower but that's on with like 30 days and then maybe 20 but the average seems to be between 30 and 40 days of full quarantine now imagine how rough that would have been in the medieval period they couldn't watch TV they couldn't you know listen to audio books they couldn't play video games or any number of things and I'm not saying quarantine isn't rough for us in the modern day we're saying it was so much worse for them all right and that's what they had to deal with the other difficult thing about quarantine is that in the medieval context you needed to work much more for your own survival food to keep yourself warm especially in winters and types of winters that could hit certain parts of Europe Britain so on so if you had to be quarantined how could you help you know and protect yourself in some cases one person was allowed to leave that people would avoid him of course but in other cases they like if it was a whole family something like that I would need to rely on other people's generosity to survive to bring them food firewood and other things to live and they would just have to get by if they could survive the quarantine they would need to find ways to amuse themselves sharing stories one to another playing games and other things but it would have been very rough and very difficult to get through it the scary thing is a common practice would be if one person fell sick with the Black Death they wouldn't know if there were other people in the household who might have contracted it but haven't had any symptoms appear yet and so the whole house would need to be put down on quarantine sometimes this was enforced very aggressively but if you quarantine anybody with someone who has the plague that basically means everyone in that household is gonna contract the plague and it's only a matter of time until they all die unless someone was lucky enough to be immune and so one person gets a black death the household would die but that is only in cases where it could be enforced it comes down to personal choice and there was an obvious reality that struck many people and that was near certain death or save yourself for myself I know if I contracted and I was in that period if I could track to the back black death and I had symptoms I would send my entire family away to try and save their lives and I would happily die alone I don't know what I would do if it was one of my children this is the choice that a lot of parents had to choose many chose to stay with their children and die with them that I wouldn't have to die alone I think that's what I would ultimately choose but I understand the choice and this wouldn't have been an easy choice we're sisters brothers children and parents chose to abandon their loved ones so they wouldn't die as well I can only imagine how heartbreaking and difficult that would have been and it was a common thing that people had to do to survive I would never blame or judge anyone for making that choice I've certainly never been in such a situation and I know if as I mentioned if I had such a disease I would want my family to move away of course I don't think children would be able to be that emotionally mature it would be hard for them to comprehend what was happening to them but what a horrifying reality because just remember how lethal this was and how many people it killed 60% of the population and think about that account was it from Chaucer where entire villages just became ghost towns everyone had died if you walk to that town it would just be littered with corpses in there on either on the streets or in their homes death everywhere and then the homes would start to fall into disrepair Fox and animals walking around unattended it would be a whole scape and of course villages like that you would run away from you could just avoid well I could a plague kind of an appropriate term that has arisen out of that because that was the other way that people could try and protect themselves was to avoid the plague like the plague and if they use heavy quarantine measures that was how they could ultimately survive and of course they needed to dispose the dead either going in and it was hard to find the information as to how long the infection stayed on the corpses of people who had died from it and what time it would be safe to actually handle the dead to bury them because we went in and you'd want to especially those a loved one and you cared for them you would want to bury them but because there is a time of infection shortly after death you could get infected again so sometimes to protect anyone from getting infected and if the whole family had died from this if there was no risk of the fire spreading to other houses they could just burn down the entire house to protect the surrounding community from the infection the ultimate way in which the Black Plague had run its course was that really most there were some people escaped when they enacted heavy quarantine but most people who were most susceptible to this disease had died from it there is not really a thing like herd immunity because it's not like you could survive it and build antibodies armor and just resist it from there on because most people who got it simply died from it and the population that remained were even the ones that practice every quarantine or the ones that were more naturally resistant and immune to the disease and that is why later a kind of outbreaks of the plague weren't nearly as devastating as the main Black Plague because the outbreak would hit an area where people were either more susceptible hadn't hit before other things like that but I was more difficult to spread because the population in a large measure unfortunately had them most vulnerable already died from it the other thing that we need to understand about the Black Plague is that people still had to live their lives all right and so they had to risk you know getting sick to plant crops okay farm produce food heap them songs warm make clothing any number of things to help people live they still had to do and so things just had to progress and they had to deal with this horrifying danger of the plague and if it arose in you know your community your family it's a horrifying thing that you just have to deal with attentionally die from but the people ultimately did survive those forty percent that survives and with the measures that they were able to put in place sometimes works not always but they were able to get through its and ultimately recover from it and when I look back on this like I said at the beginning of this video I am just left with a profound sense of gratitude I'm so lucky and I'm living today and not back then and I am grateful though the things that you know people of the past have endured to help bring us to the time we are living in right now we're at the difficult times of the modern day our orders of magnitude better than some of the best times of the past so thank you for joining me with this detailed look at the Black Plague where we dispelled some of the misconceptions but also learnt a bit more about it and try and put ourselves in their shoes figure out what it would have been like I appreciate you watching the video and of course I hope to see you again so until that time farewell you

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 319,796

Rating: 4.9331913 out of 5

Keywords: medieval, history, middle ages, the bubonic plague, the black death, historical, education, pandemic, quarantine, sickness, rat, rats, flea, transmition, carriers, desease, infection, Europe, Brittany

Id: 9TGObcfp61M

Length: 30min 3sec (1803 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Little_leape]

I’m sure it was a really informative video, but it is also a really depressing topic and especially at this time, and the fact that it even got shad crying, I couldn’t watch the full video. Too sad for me