Showing papers on "Plague (disease) published in 1978"

The influence of bubonic plaque in England 1500-1667.

Abstract: A GOOD DEAL is now known about the incidence of plague in this country during the early modern period, but attempts to probe the wider impact of these epidemics on the general history of the era have been rare. This is curious, for plague occupies a prominent position in tlhe historiography of the later middle ages; but while the disease remained a major factor in the lives of Englishmen for nearly two centuries after the close of the medieval period, the modem historian can find no place for it in his survey of the forces moulding the development of Tudor and Stuart England. This essay is an attempt to examine the demographic, social, economic, and moral impact of plague epidemics. It makes no attempt to cover the chronological and geographical patterns of the disease, or to describe its medical aspects, since these areas are well reviewed by recent published work.' Of course plague was only one among many epidemic diseases which afflicted the period under examination: typhus and dysentery were more common, influenza (particularly in the great pandemic of 1556-59) killed many more people, and the rate of population growth continued to be determined by the many and obscure destroyers of children. Why, then, should we select plague for a special prominence? The answer lies in the uniquely disruptive and disturbing consequences of its epidemics, caused by certain basic characteristics of the disease which deserve prior treatment and are chiefly derived from the peculiar transmission of the organism by means of the rat flea. A most important feature of plague was that it travelled slowly, and crossed open spaces with the greatest difficulty. This was due to the sedentary nature of the black rat, living whenever possible in the roof spaces of houses and averse to wandering across countryside or crossing water. For this reason plague was essentially a disease of towns, for only in such settlements was a concentration of houses, and so of rats, possible: the epizootic among rats which necessarily preceded a human epidemic required that infected rats or their fleas should be able to move easily between one house and the next, not commonly true of villages. When the disease was spread between communities, it was probably taken by infected rats or their fleas, carried involuntarily by carts, packhorses or ships, another factor concentrating infection on ports and towns on major roads. It is this necessarily urban concentration ofplague Alan D. Dyer, B.A., Ph.D., University College of North Wales, Bangor. 1 E.g. Leonard F. Hirst, The conquest of plague, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1953; John F. D. Shrewsbury, A history ofbubonic plague in the British Isles, Cambridge University Press, 1971; J.-N. Biraben, L'homme et la peste, 2 vols., Paris, Mouton, 1975-76; The plague reconsidered, Matlock, Derbyshire, Local Population Studies, 1977.

Geographical Origin of the Black Death

Abstract: A propos de l'art. de J. Norris East or West? The Geographical Origin of the Black Death (ibid., vol. 51, 1, pp. 1-24). Arguments contre la these de J. N. La reponse de celui-ci.

Rodent population control for public health and safety

Abstract: Author(s): Barnes, Allan M | Abstract: Rodent populations - particularly those that live in close proximity to man - constitute a perennial and often severe threat to man's health as reservoirs and often as direct sources of infection for a wide variety of viral, rickettsial, and bacterial disease producing agents The following will discuss the place of rodent population reduction for the control of plague, a bacterial disease of rodents transmitted by fleas endemic in the western United States

A note on Thomas Lodge's A Treatise of the Plagues (1603).

Abstract: IN 1968,1 in discussing Creighton's History of epidemics2 I warned against his acceptance of descriptions of plague by writers such as Gilbert Skeyne and Thomas Lodge3 as trustworthy evidence based on real observation ofcontemporary epidemics; they were, I said, in this respect basically repetitions of what Avicenna4 had written over five hundred years earlier. Had I known it at the time, I could have made the point even more strongly in the case of Lodge, for, at the same time that my essay was being published, an article by Elliane Cuvelier proved conclusively that Lodge's A treatise of the plague is essentially a translation of Francois Val1eriole's rare Traicte de la peste published in 1566 by Antoine Gryphe ofLyons, which in turn is repetitious of Valleriole's earlier book Loci medicinae communes (also published by the house of Gryphe, in 1562).6 What Cuvelier does not note is the debt, in turn, to Avicenna.

Changes in Testamentary Practice at Montpellier on the Eve of the Black Death

Abstract: The Black Death arrived in southern France, at Marseille, in January 1348. It then spread westward, reaching Carcassonne by February and Perpignan by March. There is no exact chronology of the outbreak of the plague in Montpellier. However, the disease probably appeared by March 1348, since it spread along trade routes and the town was considerably closer to Marseille than both Carcassonne and Perpignan. The recorded toll of the Black Death in Montpellier at first seems great enough to account for any changes in the behavior of the population in the plague year. For this commercial and financial capital of Lower Languedoc, 1348 was generally termed “lan de la mortalidat.”