Volume 46, Number 4 · March 4, 1999
The Bright Side of the Plague
By Joel E. Cohen
The Black Death and the Transformation of the West
by David Herlihy, edited and with an introduction by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Harvard University Press, 117 pp., $12.00 (paper)
What was the infectious agent of the Black Death that struck Europe in 1348 and succeeding decades? The classical answer is Yersinia pestis, today's bubonic plague. But if the disease had been bubonic plague, then outbreaks in the human population should have been preceded by extensive deaths among local rodents. The fleas that transmitted the infection among rats would then have been forced to abandon the cold bodies of their former rodent hosts and would have settled on the people who fed and sheltered the rats. But no contemporary account mentions a lethal outbreak of mortal disease (or epizootic) among rodents during the fourteenth or fifteenth century. On these grounds, more than one historian has challenged the identification of the Black Death as bubonic plague. Still, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Sometimes plague is transmitted from person to person by airborne droplets, and an initial epizootic among rodents could have passed unrecorded.
Review, 2594 words
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