Home > Science Seminar > Fall 2006 Seminar Schedule > Medieval Black Death
The Science Seminar Series: November 9, 2006 4pm
The Medieval Black Death: A New Look at an Old Killer
Dr. Brian Bossak
Dept of Physics, Astronomy, and Geosciences
Powell HallTime: 4:00 - 5:00pm
Abstract
Perhaps the greatest pandemic in recorded human history took place over 650 years ago, between 1347 and 1351 A.D. Contemporary scholars referred to this affliction as “The Great Mortality”, and it was responsible for the deaths of approximately half of the residents of Europe at the time (around 25 to 30 million out of 75 million inhabitants). This affliction, known today by its current moniker - the “Black Death” - has haunted centuries of generations of plague survivors’ descendents within Eurasia. For at least 100 years, since the identification of the Yersinia pestis bacterium by Dr. Alexander Yersin in 1894 during the peak of the Third Pandemic in India and China, the culprit behind the “Black Death” has been attributed to bubonic plague, the human disease state caused by infection with Y. pestis. In fact, many historians today interchange the terms “Black Death” and bubonic plague, and the mere mention of the term “plague” generally conjures references to the medieval “Black Death”.
Over the past twenty years or so, a new line of thinking regarding the “Black Death” has occurred among some leading scientists. A variety of emerging geographical, biological, and epidemiological evidence now suggests that the commonly held belief that the “Black Death” was a pandemic of bubonic plague is suspect, and published work has begun offering new explanations for the “Great Mortality”. Among these explanations is the possibility that the medieval plague was caused by a strain of Anthrax or an Ebola-like virus, or perhaps even an especially rare, hyper virulent strain of Y. pestis originating in marmots, not rats (the usual suspect during outbreaks of bubonic plague). In this presentation, the author presents the multitude of accumulating evidence against bubonic plague as the causative agent of the “Black Death”, and offers a new, alternative hypothesis regarding the causative agent of the medieval “Black Death”. This new hypothesis has potentially deadly ramifications under certain scenarios related to future global environmental changes.