![]() ![]() There have been many other outbreaks of plague other than the 1348-1350 pandemic. Following the plague pandemic, this image was so burned into Europe's psyche that it spawned our modern visualization of The Undead, a stark contrast to the prior depictions of liches and kin as unusually pale but otherwise unremarkable, animalistic, or totally skeletal. The disturbing explanation for the disease's alternate name, the black death, is that in both the septisemic and bubonic presentations, the victims are left in a horrific swollen and decaying state due to a combination of ruptured lymph nodes and frostbite-like patches of black gangrene - before they die. Bubonic plague victims, on the other hand, can take days or even weeks to die, and around one-third actually survive with long lasting traumatic damage to their internal organs and immune systems- with the effect of making these victims the most noticeable and horrifying. note Even with the intervention of modern medicine within the first 24 hours, the survival rate only goes up to 4-15%. Septicemic plague is always fatal and can kill within hours of the first symptoms appearing, or sometimes even before any symptoms occur. The difference? Pneumonic plague kills all but a handful of sufferers, mostly within a week of the first symptoms. Septicemic plague affects the bloodstream. In coastal areas, the most common form of plague at that time was pneumonic plague, which affects the lungs. "Bubonic" is merely one way the disease plays out: by infecting the lymph system and colonizing the lymph nodes, which swell up into "bubos". Keep in mind that the disease is not called the "bubonic plague" it's simply "plague". In terms of absolute numbers, with anywhere between 75 million and 200 million deaths, it was the absolute deadliest pandemic ever recorded and proportionally the single deadliest event in recorded history. It's believed that an outright majority of Europe and Asia's population was killed by this outbreak. Experienced by the whole of Eurasian/Mediterranean civilization to some degree, it so traumatized the human race that the formal name the disease was given in Europe, derived from the Latin words for to strike down, and to lament note plaga and plangere respectively, is to this day synonymous with both "widespread threat to society" and "lethal contagious disease": The Plague. Both the event and the disease are also known by the name given by later writers, the Black Death. The pathogen Yersinia pestis, originating from Central Asia, has caused some of the deadliest pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between 13 in the Great Pestilence with strains continuing until the 1700s. Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters (1349) ![]()
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