The England Black Death Plague

by balisunset in History, July 27, 2008

No one knows why the bubonic plague, or Black Death as it came to be known in England, broke out in eastern Siberia in the 1300s and spread westward. There was very little knowledge, at that time, of the ways by which diseases are carried from place to place, so many of the efforts to get rid of them were ineffective.

In later years it was discovered that infected fleas were the carriers. They passed on the disease to rats and when the rats died the fleas attacked humans. In 1347, a ship sailing from a Black Sea port to Messina in Italy, arrived at its destination with every person on board dead. It appears that the last to die were able to get the ship into port before they died. The port authorities in Italy, as soon as they saw what happened, had the ship carried out of the harbor, but their action was too late to stop the spread of the disease. Most of the people of Messina were already infected and, from this city, the disease spread quickly across Europe and across the English Channel, reaching London a year later, in 1348, where it killed close to half of the city’s people. Within the following three centuries London suffered several different epidemics but these and even the experience of 1348 were relatively benign compared with the violence of the outbreak of Black Death that swept across London in 1665.

The name by which the bubonic plague came to be known was related to the formation of black boils in the armpits, neck, and groin of infected people, which were caused by dried blood accumulating under the skin after internal bleeding. People first experienced the bacterium of BlackDeath as chills, fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. Frequently, the disease spread to the lungs and almost always in these cases the victims died soon afterward. The name pneumonic plague was given to these cases. In all victims the disease spread easily from person to person through the air and, in the vast majority of instances, death ensued. London’s population in 1665 was half a million; it was the biggest city in Europe. The first victim of the Black Death was diagnosed late in 1664 but it was in May of the following year that significant numbers of infections were being observed. By June, in the wake of a heat wave, more than seven thousand lives were being claimed by the Black Death every week. Those who could leave the city as the wave of death swept over it did so. The king and his retinue left. So did many of the clergy and nobility. The biggest surprise and the one that everyone condemned was the departure of the president of the Royal College of Physicians. All who were unable to leave the city, the vast majority, had to cope as best they could.