When was plague in europe

The last great epidemic in France was and Russia in the s. Why it declined is unclear. Outbreaks of plague continued in Asia throughout the s.

The third pandemic wave began in Southern China in , spreading south and west. Between and there were over 24, cases in Hong Kong. From Hong Kong it entered the ports of India, where at least 12 million people died over 20 years. By the end of the s, developments in bacteriology and infection control meant that medical researchers were able to observe and investigate the disease in detail for the first time.

A team of European scientists was sent to colonial Hong Kong in the s to study the epidemic. French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin isolated the bacterium that caused the disease in , and it was named Yersinia pestis after him.

In Paul Louis Somond established the mechanism for transmission was via fleas, which transferred bacteria from infected hosts to the non-infected through their bites. The fleas were transported around the world overland and on ships by black rats. Known as house rats or ship rats, black rats liked to live in close proximity to humans. When the rats died the fleas moved onto human hosts. The fleas also infested clothing and could be carried to other locations in that way.

Spores of Bacillus pestis which caused the plague and its vector the human flea Pulex irritans. Coloured drawing by A J E Terzi. The names of the strains are engraved on the back. From Hong Kong the epidemic spread to the major Indian ports. When the plague broke out in Bombay in colonial India in , in the Nowroji Hill district, a Goan doctor called Acacio Viegas was the first to identify the disease as bubonic plague.

His vociferous campaign to clean up the slums and kill rats prompted the colonial authorities to call in scientific experts, including Waldemar Haffkine — Haffkine had worked at the Pasteur Insitute in Paris and was developing a cholera vaccine at the time.

He established a laboratory in Bombay in where he worked on a plague vaccine. The immunology of bubonic plague proved challenging but in October he produced a vaccine ready for human testing.

Haffkine tested it on himself first, then on prison volunteers. By , over four million people had been inoculated. The experience of plague in s Bombay shows just how complex it can be to control an epidemic in large populations. As with other plague epidemics, the outbreak in India had a major social impact. Many people left the city, causing a significant drop in the population.

Many in the infected area were mill workers and the epidemic effectively brought the textile industry to a halt. The colonial authorities instituted an aggressive programme of anti-plague measures, including house searches for victims, enforced evacuation of residents in infected areas, detention camps for travellers and the exclusion of traditional medicine practitioners from infected areas.

The restrictions were imposed by the Special Plague Committee and enforced by the colonial army. Such tactics caused widespread protests and alarm among the various communities, culminating in the murder of the British chairman of the Special Plague Committee in the city of Pune. But as with earlier outbreaks, some of the measures laid the foundations for public health in modern India.

After the outbreak, the authorities in Bombay set up the Bombay City Improvement Trust to try to create a healthier city. Wider roads were planned to channel fresh sea air into the more crowded areas, as a sanitary measure. And the Haffkine Institute for infectious disease continues its biomedical research in modern Mumbai formerly Bombay. By the s plague epidemics were a thing of the past. Natural history of plague: perspectives from more than a century of research.

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Clin Microbiol Rev ; 10 1 : Zoonotic Infections — Plague. Medieval people believed that the Black Death came from God, and so responded with prayers and processions. The plague bacteria were identified in Asia in the s, and the connection with animals and fleas established.

It then came to Britain, where it struck Dorset and Hampshire along the south coast of England simultaneously. The plague then spread north and east, then on to Scandinavia and Russia. But what is the evidence? The lethality of the Black Death arose from the onslaught of three types: bubonic, pneumonic and, occasionally, septicaemic plague. Old and young. Men and women. All of society — royalty, peasants, archbishops, monks, nuns and parish clergy — was affected. No subset of people was immune to the Black Death.

Contemporary chroniclers list important knights, ladies, and merchants who died during the Black Death. Many wealthy and well-fed convents, friaries, and monasteries across Europe lost more than half of their members, with some becoming extinct. Both artisan and artistic skills were lost or severely affected, from cathedral building in Italy to pottery production in England.

Artists such as the Lorinzetti brothers of Siena were victims, and the English royal masons, the Ramseys, died. There were shortages of people to till the land and tend cattle and sheep.

By the third or fourth wave of plague in the last decades of the 14th century, burial records and tax registers suggest that the disease had evolved into one that largely affected the poor.

In —49, some of the worst-hit regions were in mountainous and in relatively isolated zones, such as in Snowdonia in Wales or the mountain village of Mangona in the Alpi fiorentine, north of Florence, whose communications with cities were less frequent than places further down the slopes and closer to cities.

The experiences of these isolated villages may have been similar to small mining villages in Pennsylvania or in South Africa, or Inuit settlements in Newfoundland under attack by another highly contagious pandemic, the Great Influenza of —19, in which they experienced mortalities from 10 to 40 per cent — many times higher than in New York City or London.

For reasons that are difficult to explain, cities such as Milan and Douai in Flanders, both major hubs of commerce and industry, appear to have escaped the Black Death in almost totally unscathed. In the case of Milan, only one household fell victim to the disease, at least according to chronicles, and the plague was successfully contained. Meanwhile, Douai chronicles, monastic necrologies, and archival records recording, for example, the deaths of magistrates, and last wills and testaments show no certain signs of the plague entering that city until the plague of Listen to Elma Brenner examine the state of healthcare in the Middle Ages and reveal some unusual remedies that were offered for people with injuries or diseases:.

In German-speaking lands, France along the Rhine, and parts of Spain, municipal governments, castellans, bishops, and the Holy Roman Emperor accused Jews of spreading the Black Death by poisoning foodstuffs and water sources, and massacred entire communities of men, women, and babies for these supposed crimes.