To start with, the Black Death had no name. People called it the ‘Pestilence' or the, 'Great Mortality,' It has three forms –
BUBONIC PLAGUE. (Most common type.) Large lymph nodes or buboes (black swellings about the size of an egg or an apple) erupt in the armpits and groin oozing blood and pus. Boils cover the body and black blotches appear on the skin from all the internal bleeding. There is sudden fever, restlessness, confusion and severe pain. Death within five days.
PNEUMONIC PLAGUE. The infection spreads to lungs causing pneumonia. Coughing expels millions of contagious bacteria. Sharp chest pains. Continuous fever. Heavy sweating. Spitting up of blood. Death within three days or less.
SEPTICAEMIC PLAGUE. Infection in the bloodstream. Least common form of disease. Most fatal. Sudden severe illness. Chills, fever, headache, nausea, vomiting, delirium. No time for other symptoms to develop. Death within a few hours to two days. This is how people at the time described the plague. Such descriptions are called contemporary accounts. "The victims died almost immediately. They would swell beneath their armpits and in their groins and fall over dead while talking.” Before the end "death is seen seated on the face." It seemed as if one sick person "could infect the whole world.” “Woe is me of the shilling on the armpit! It is seething, terrible ... a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry... a painful angry knob... Great is it seething like a burning cinder.”
Modern people know that infectious diseases:
• are caused by organisms such as bacteria and viruses from outside invading
the body
• can be passed from one person to another
• usually raise the temperature of the victim or cause a fever.
Plague can be cured today because scientists have found out the bacteria that causes plague is carried by rats and the fleas that live on rats. The flea finds a rat to be its host. It bites the rat and infects the blood of the rat. When the flea or rat bites a human, it passes the disease on. When the human comes into contact with other humans, it passes the disease on.
But nobody in the Middle Ages knew this. People who wrote about the plague never mentioned fleas. They only mentioned rats in passing. Yet fleas and rats were common pests.
The plague bacillus was not discovered for another 500 years.
