The Black Plague and Pandemics

Everyone has heard of the ten plagues of Egypt from the Book of Exodus – blood, frogs, lice, flies, livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and first-born. Then there were the waves of the Black Death, the plague that encompassed most of Europe and it changed the face of Europe forever.

Albrecht Durer depicted the awfulness of the Black Death in one of his black ink etchings, bringing attention to the repenting frenzy of the strange penitents known as the Brotherhood of Flagellants.

The order included both men and women. They believed that, if they whipped themselves to bleeding or allowed a Master of Pilgrimage to do the whipping, ripping their flesh with a scourge of leather thongs and pointed metal studs, then the plague would be lifted. The penitents endured this horror for thirty-three and a half days during which time they were not allowed to clean or treat their wounds. They had hoped to appease God in this manner. Thankfully, Pope Clement VI outlawed this strange sect in October 1349.

To the people of fourteenth century Europe, the plagues were God’s punishment for their sins. Twenty-five million Europeans died within four years, 1347-1351. They believed that self-punished might appease God to relent this scourge.

Nobody understood that plague bacteria were carried in the fur of black rats and spread by flea bites and from bodily fluids of infected humans. The bacillus Pasteurella pestis lives in the bloodstream or the stomach of a flea. The fleas’ favorite rodent for residence is Rattus rattus, the black rat.

Trade caravans from Central Asia, where the plague was endemic, carried the plague to China then to Crimea, and then by ship to the Mediterranean coast via trade routes and finally across Europe. It was believed that the rats fled from droughts or floods to China.

Not many Europeans were spared. Isolation, segregation, and heat worked to stop the infection and its spread.

The Archbishop of Milan ordered the first three houses where the bubonic plague was walled in with all the sick, dead, and healthy entombed within. The city was spared and nobody else got sick.

In his Decameron, the author Giovanni Boccaccio described the isolation of ten young patricians in a palazzo to avoid contact with people in plague-stricken Florence. They kept themselves entertained by telling stories as written in the Decameron. Segregation worked for them and for the area of present-day Poland which was spared the plague because a quarantine was imposed. Quarantine was isolation for forty days.

Pope Clement VI isolated himself at Avignon, France. He sat for weeks in summertime between two large fires constantly stoked. It worked because fire and heat repelled the fleas.

An English nobleman ordered the nearby village to be burned to the ground. No fleas, rats, or disease reached his castle, and his property was safe. It seemed that overpopulation and overcrowding in unsanitary conditions contributed to the spread of the plagues.

The plagues came in three forms, bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic.

The bubonic variety appeared as swollen lymph nodes called buboes or boils in the armpits, groin, or the site of the flea bite.

The pneumonic variety infected the lungs, causing coughing and spitting of blood.

The deadliest was the septicemic plague where the bloodstream was invaded by bacteria and death occurred within hours.

Not everybody died of the plague. Many improved and their recovery was considered a miracle. Doctors prescribed bleeding, laxatives, enemas, burning of the buboes (sometimes it worked), aromatic woods burned to purify the air, rosewater and vinegar sprinkled on floors, special diets, and other strange concoctions.

The Black Death encompassed most of present-day Europe, all the way to Russia and the Black Sea, Constantinople, and Greece.

Following the loss of such a huge European population, the labor market changed; workers could ask for higher wages. Merchants had to sell grain and other commodities for lower prices.

As the population began to increase after the Black Death ended, new waves of plagues occurred centuries later. The epidemic of 1665 in London affected the population less as doctors learned better ways to control it. Still, thousands died. The 17^th century solution was to kill cats and dogs, the poor creatures that could have reduced the rat population carrying the fleas.

One of the famous plagues that hit the Roman Empire hard, the Antonine Plague, put an end to Pax Romana, according to Colin Elliott. Pax Romana represented two centuries of Roman domination of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia.

Millions died in the Empire, the population decline was so severe that a financial crisis followed, and borders were weakened. The 165 A.D. plague even killed one of the emperors. The pandemic lasted until 180 A.D., affecting the entire Empire. Marcus Aurelius could not save the Empire from pestilence, nor from the many other disasters of that time.

Interestingly, Marcus Aurelius only mentioned the Antonine plague once in all his twelve books of Meditations.

The second outbreak occurred in 251-266 A.D. which aggravated the effects of the earlier outbreak. Some historians are convinced that these plagues were the beginning of the ultimate fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. The pandemic was a huge source of social, economic, and political disruption within the Roman Empire.

Galen described the symptoms of this pandemic. Some of the symptoms resembled smallpox and others appeared like the buboes of the plague.

As we have experienced, even with modern medicine and aggressive government intervention, the world suffered immensely from the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

How Many People Can the Planet Sustain?

As a college student I was fascinated by David Attenborough’s Living Planet. He was my hero. I was certainly disappointed when I learned that he has joined the chorus of global warming alarmists who turned into climate change scaremongers when it became evident that the planet has actually cooled in the last sixteen years. Of course the planet’s climate has changed for billions of years and it has nothing to do with human activity or their existence..

Climate change environmentalists choose to mix catastrophic weather events with climate whenever it is convenient to their message, so long as there is a progressive faux science “consensus” and their global warming/climate change guru, Al Gore, agrees. Never mind that science is based on fact not on “consensus.” And the facts and data must not be manufactured to fit political agendas.

In a Malthusian style, David Attenborough describes humans in less than favorable words – plague, hordes. “We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.” (Radio Times as quoted by The Telegraph)

Thomas Robert Malthus wrote in 1798 in “An Essay on the Principle of Population” that population growth would prevent advancement to utopian society: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” He was certainly proven wrong.

A patron of the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David Attenborough speaks against “the frightening explosion in human numbers” and the need for sex education and voluntary ways of limiting population in developing countries. Another patron of note is Dame Jane Morris Goodall, the famous anthropologist who studied chimpanzees for 45 years.

The Optimum Population Trust website (http://www.populationmatters.org/) displays a world population clock and promotes a sustainable future, sustainable consumption, family planning, conservation of the natural world, ending population growth, gender equality, and living within one’s means. Sustainability, as they see it, has to “address poverty, gender inequality, natural resource limits, climate change, biodiversity loss, and population density. These goals are also part of the U.N. Agenda 21.   

Sir Attenborough provides Ethiopia as a convenient example of famine caused by “too many people there” who cannot support themselves. However, as societies become more civilized, better educated, technologically advanced, and richer, do they not produce smaller families who live longer and healthier lives?

“Attenborough seems to have a Malthusian dislike of the human race.” (Harry Mount, The Telegraph, January 22, 2013)

We are not a plague on the earth. We have actually eradicated the plague that killed millions in the Middle Ages and we have helped billions of humans double their life expectancy.

Proponents of global warming conveniently forget that from 1350 until around 1850, Europe went through a period called the Little Ice Age – this was during a time when human industrial scale activity barely existed.

Napoleon’s retreating Grande Armée encountered a terrible cold in Russia and many soldiers perished from exposure to these extreme temperatures, as well as starvation because the much shorter growing seasons made it impossible to have enough food for an invading army, coupled with typhus spread by lice. In 2001, thousands of skeletons were found in Vilnius, Lithuania, the remains of Napoleon’s soldiers. (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/pandemics/2012/12/napoleon_march_to_russia_in_1812_typhus_spread_by_lice_was_more_powerful.html)

The Optimum Population Trust boasts that “Our vision is of a global population size enabling decent living standards and environmental sustainability.” Who is going to decide the optimum population number, how will the excess population be disposed of, what are the parameters of decent living standards, and of environmental sustainability? Who chose these people to be the arbiters of human life and death, caretakers of the planet, and controllers of our happiness and of the future? Must we adopt the cruel and murderous one-child policy of China?

The Club of Rome and United Nations with all their wealthy and famous patrons and supporters are the arbiters of our population size, our right to inhabit the planet, and the life style we have chosen for ourselves given our modern society. “A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.” (United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment)

The Club of Rome is less generous with its demographic estimation, …"the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.” (Goals of Mankind)

The Club of Rome, in its search for a common enemy to fit their agenda in order to control the world’s population through the United Nations, came up with the idea that “pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine would fit the bill and are caused by human intervention.” The sad thing is that low information humans believe everything without questioning.