Tag: Bubonic Plague
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Medicine and the Jews in the Middle Ages
Shelley GrachChicago, Illinois, United States In the Middle Ages, fear and superstition often stood in the path of helping the sick, as maladies were believed to result from the sins of the afflicted. These roadblocks were compounded by inherited hostility towards Jews, impeding Jewish participation in scientific education at educational institutions. The University of Montpellier…
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Samuel Pepys: Stones and groans
Samuel Pepys. Portrait by John Hayls, 1666. National Portrait Gallery, London. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. I polished up that handle so carefully That now I am the ruler of the Queen’s Navy – HMS Pinafore, Gilbert and Sullivan Introduction Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) did not polish doorknobs to rise in the world. He was…
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The Pearl of the Orient: the persistence of Dr. Wu Lien-teh
Ku Ezriq Raif bin Ku Besry Perlis, Malaysia Dr. Wu Lien-teh 1935. Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain. The work of Wu Lien-teh in controlling the 1910 Manchurian Plague has been celebrated as “a milestone in the systematic practice of epidemiological principles in disease control.” The cloth face mask he developed, “the principal means of personal protection”1…
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Boccaccio’s Decameron in the world of the coronavirus pandemic
Mateja Lekic Phoenix, Arizona, United States A Tale from the Decameron, by John William Waterhouse, 1916. Source. Licensed for Public Use. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote the Decameron after the carnage of the bubonic plague in the late 1340s.1 Caused by the highly virulent bacterium Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague, or Black Death, killed an estimated one quarter…
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Oswaldo Cruz and the eradication of infectious diseases in Brazil
Robert PerlmanChicago, Illinois, United States In 1899, an epidemic of bubonic plague caused a crisis in the Brazilian port city of Santos. Ship captains were angry that their boats had to remain in quarantine and so denied that the disease was plague. They and others argued that this new disease was not as deadly as…
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Girolamo Cardano: Renaissance physician and polymath
Born at Pavia in the duchy of Lombardy in 1501, Girolamo Cardano practiced medicine for fifty years but is remembered chiefly as a polymath. He composed 200 works, made important contributions to mathematics and algebra, invented several mechanical devices (some still in use today), and published extensive philosophical tracts and commentaries on the ancient philosophers…
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Mary Niles and the Canton rats
Edward McSweegan Kinston, Rhode Island, United States Doctor Mary West Niles, Wikipedia Bubonic plague arrived in Honolulu in December 1899. A month later it had spread to San Francisco, where the infection caused a series of deadly outbreaks until 1907.1 But for decades before plague reached the American west coast, it had burned through…
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Live chicken for treating plague buboes
Detail of Zug der Soldaten und Marketenderinnen by Franz Brun. 1559. Prints, Drawings and Watercolors from the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. When the bubonic plague struck Europe after 1347, it left the medical profession helpless. Unable to cure or contain the disease, doctors focused largely on dealing with…