The Black Death
Alicia A Davis
World History 103
Georganne Gabrielli
October 29, 2009
The Black Death
Many hundreds of years ago, at a time when people feared the unknown, a darkness descended on the middle ages in the form of a plague that decimated thousands- both animal and human alike-creating chaos and terror and without the knowledge of how it began or how to end it the people desperately searched for medical, astronomical and religious reasons, and even found people to blame for the dreadful tragedy they called the Black Death. Once it began it raged through the populations taking most that it came in contact with making the death count many millions. In the end it would take several years at the least for most societies to gain some semblance of regularity and normalcy and some would never recover at all.
The name Black Death comes from the physical effects of the bubonic strain of the plague. Even though the pneumonic strain-which was the most dangerous partly because it could be transmitted through the air-may very well have been present, the term was given to the plague in general, because at the time the people did not know that it was two different strains of the same disease. Bubonic plague was the most common and it infected the lymphatic system (Sanders, Nelson, Morillo, and Ellenberger, 2006; pg 386). The lymphatic system was a very large portion of the immune system (Plague, 2009). So it only stands to reason that if the lymphatic system was the first to be attacked, it would drastically decrease the body’s ability to fight off the fevers and infections indirectly caused by the plague. The lymph nodes would swell up to agonizing sizes and turn black then burst, with death following shortly thereafter, thus the Black Death (Knox, 2004). These were not the only symptoms though; people came down with fevers, rashes, and token-size, blister-like spots, as well (Knox, 2004). The entire process only lasted a matter of days, but...