write essay on black death

Impact of the Black Death Essay

Introduction, social impacts of the black death, economic impacts of the black death, political impacts of the black death, reference list.

The Black Death was, no doubt, the greatest population disaster that has ever occurred in the history of Europe. The name is given to the bubonic plaque that occurred in the fourteenth century in Europe killing millions of people. The plaque began in the year 1348, and by the year 1359, it had killed an approximate 1.5 million people, out of an estimated total population of about 4 million people.

So terrifying was the Black Death that peasants were blaming themselves for its occurrence, and thus some of them resulted to punishing themselves as a way of seeking God’s forgiveness. The bubonic plaque was caused by fleas that were hosted by rats, a common phenomenon in the cities and towns. The presence of rats in the cities and towns was due to the fact that the towns were littered, and they were poorly managed.

The worst part of it is the fact that the medieval peasants did not know that the plaque was caused by the pleas hosted by the rats. They actually believed that the plague was caused by the rats themselves. As more and more people died from the Black Death, the impacts of the plague became more profound.

The plague affected the demographic composition of the society, and thus it had far-reaching effects on the social, economic, political and even cultural realms of the medieval society. To this day, the Black Death is remembered as the worst demographic disaster to be ever experienced in European history (Robin, 2011). This paper is an in-depth analysis of the impacts of the Black Death.

The Black Death had far reaching social impacts on the people who lived during the fourteenth century. An obvious social impact of the plague is the fact that the Black Death led to a significant reduction in the human population of the affected areas. This had extensive effects on all aspects of life, including the social and political structure of the affected areas.

Before the plague, feudalism, the European social structure in medieval times, had created a society in which inequality was rife, with many poor peasants, and rich lords. This fuelled overpopulation, which was a catalyst for the mortality of the plaque. After the plaque, a large number of the overpopulated peasants became victims of the plaque, and thus the lords lacked labourers in their farms. This also led to a significant reduction in the population (Bryrne, 2011).

The people who were spared by the plague lived full lives. They regarded themselves as the next victims of the bubonic plague. This led to immoral behaviour that saw societal codes like the sexual codes broken. People did not care about having virtues anymore because they knew that death was approaching fast. As people lost their partners to the plague, the marriage market grew, fuelling more sexual immorality (Carol, 1996).

Also among the immediate social impacts is the fact that at one point, the number of people who were dying from the bubonic plague was seemingly more than the number of the living. This made it virtually impossible for the living to take care of the ailing, or even for the living to bury the deceased. This was a social crisis that has remained in the books of history as a remarkable impact of the bubonic plague.

Immediately after the occurrence of the Black Death, all economic activities were paralysed. The first economic activity to suffer substantially from the plaque was trade. Although people were not aware that it was the infectiousness of the plaque that was making it to kill more people, they were afraid to travel to plagued areas for fear of coming into contact with rats, which they believed was the source of the disease. This substantially affected trade ties between villages and communities in the medieval European society.

After the occurrence of the Black Death, other impacts of the plague started affecting the community. The population of the European parts affected by the plaque reduced drastically, leading to a severe shortage of labour for the farms. The demand of peasant farmers increased, with the lords competing for them by relocating them from their villages to the farms of the latter. This made the peasants have a competitive economic edge, as they were able to negotiate for better salaries.

As the Black Death claimed more lives, farms were left unattended because the peasants who were responsible for ploughing had fallen victims of the plague. Where the lords were lucky to have had some harvest, it was challenging to bring it home due to a serious shortage of manpower.

Some harvest got destroyed in the field as there were no men to bring it home. Some animals got lost because the people who used to look after them had also fallen victims of the plague. These problems led to a number of other impacts in the medieval society of the fourteenth century (Bridbury, 1973).

As farms went unploughed and some harvest remained in the fields, people in the villages starved for food. Cities and towns also faced severe shortages of food since the farming villages around the towns did not have sufficient foodstuffs. Lords had to strategize economically in order to survive, and thus most of them resulted to keeping sheep since it was easier without the manpower.

Economic activities that required the presence of large numbers of peasants like the farming of grains lost their popularity. This, in turn, led to serious shortage of basic commodities like bread. This, coupled with the fact that the production of all kinds of foodstuffs had decreases, led to inflationary prices on commodities (“The Black Death And Its Effects”, 1935). The poor were left thriving in an environment full of hardships as the prices of foods skyrocketed.

The Black Death had a number of political impacts. First of all, the feudal social system of the fourteen-century European population demanded that peasants could not relocate from their villages at will. For a peasant to relocate from his/her village, he/she had to seek the permission of his/her lord.

After the Black Death, it became increasingly difficult for lords to get the number of peasants they required to provide them with the labour for their farms. This made lords to disregard the law, and relocate peasants to their villages so that they could work in their farms. Most of the times, the lords even declined to return the latter to their rightful villages in a bid to get maximum benefit from their labour.

Another political impact of the Black Death also stems from the reduced population of the affected areas. This is because after the number of peasants reduced, and they were able to negotiate salaries and even relocate from their villages, contrary to feudal law, the government imposed stricter rules to regulate the way peasants offer their manpower to the lords.

This was done by the introduction of the 1351 “statute for labourers” (Bridbury, 1973). The statute provided that payments to peasants were to be made with reference to the payments that were made in 1346. This meant that peasants would receive payments using the terms that were prevailing before the plague occurred.

The statute was structures such that both the lord and the peasant could be accused of breaking the law by either the peasant receiving a higher payment, or the lord giving the same. The effect of this statute was that a good number of peasants disobeyed it, leading to, arguably inhumane punishment. This fuelled revolt among the peasants who sought to fight for their rights in the 1381 Peasants Revolt (Bentley et al., 2008).

After oppressive statutes like the statute for labourers came into force, peasants started to be resistant. They therefore organized a number of revolts in a bid to attract the attention of legislators to their plea of fairness. The most serious of these revolts was the aforementioned 1381 peasant revolt. The peasants had gathered in huge numbers and marched to London. They killed senior officials of the King and took control over the tower of London.

Among their main grievances was the fact that, thirty-five years after the occurrence of the Black Death, the population had reasonably grown and the pre-existent demand for labour had substantially reduced. The lords were therefore threatening to withdraw the privileges they had given to peasants since their demand was no more. This led to the revolt as the peasants sought to fight for their privileges.

From the discussion above, it is evident that the Black Death had a lot of impacts on the European medieval society. It changed the demographic set-up of the community and thus it substantially affected the social activities of the peasants. This can be evidenced by the aforementioned increase in cases of sexual immorality as people had lost their partners in the plague.

The Black Death also had a number of economic impacts which resulted from the drastic decrease in the population of peasants. This can be evidenced by the aforementioned change by lords from grain farming to sheep farming. Lastly, the Black Death had a number of political impacts which can be exemplified by the development of the aforementioned statute for labourers.

Studies of the impacts of the bubonic plague are still ongoing. This is despite the fact that most of the impacts were realized immediately after the plague and their effects on the society analyzed. Political activists during the time, who were mostly lords, had observed the effects of the plague and made societal changes that were bound to benefit them.

However, scientists still believe that the European society still suffers significant effects of the bubonic plague. For instance, it has been established that England, where the greatest effects of the bubonic plague were perhaps felt, has significantly lower genetic diversity than it is suspected to have had in the eleventh century. Geneticists explain this by the argument that the deaths that resulted from the Black Deaths were the cause of the low genetic variation in Europe.

Bentley, Jerry H., Ziegler, Herbert F., Streets, Heather E. (2008) Traditions and

Encounters: A Brief Global History, ch9,15,19, McGraw-Hill, Inc.

Bridbury, A. (1973). The Black Death. The Economic History Review, 26: 577 – 592.

Bryrne, J. (2011). Black Death. World Book Advanced. Web.

Carol, B. (1996). Bubonic Plague in the nineteenth-century China.

Robin, N. (2011). Apocalypse Then: A History of Plague. Special Report. World Book Advanced. Web.

The Black Death And Its Effects. (1935). Readings in English History Drawn from the Original Sources: Intended to Illustrate a Short History of England. Boston: Ginn.

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IvyPanda. (2018, August 22). Impact of the Black Death. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-the-black-death/

"Impact of the Black Death." IvyPanda , 22 Aug. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-the-black-death/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Impact of the Black Death'. 22 August.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Impact of the Black Death." August 22, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-the-black-death/.

1. IvyPanda . "Impact of the Black Death." August 22, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-the-black-death/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Impact of the Black Death." August 22, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-the-black-death/.

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Black Death

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 28, 2023 | Original: September 17, 2010

The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. People gathered on the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships” out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europe—almost one-third of the continent’s population.

How Did the Black Plague Start?

Even before the “death ships” pulled into port at Messina, many Europeans had heard rumors about a “Great Pestilence” that was carving a deadly path across the trade routes of the Near and Far East. Indeed, in the early 1340s, the disease had struck China, India, Persia, Syria and Egypt.

The plague is thought to have originated in Asia over 2,000 years ago and was likely spread by trading ships , though recent research has indicated the pathogen responsible for the Black Death may have existed in Europe as early as 3000 B.C.

Symptoms of the Black Plague

Europeans were scarcely equipped for the horrible reality of the Black Death. “In men and women alike,” the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio wrote, “at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits…waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils.”

Blood and pus seeped out of these strange swellings, which were followed by a host of other unpleasant symptoms—fever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible aches and pains—and then, in short order, death.

The Bubonic Plague attacks the lymphatic system, causing swelling in the lymph nodes. If untreated, the infection can spread to the blood or lungs.

How Did the Black Death Spread?

The Black Death was terrifyingly, indiscriminately contagious: “the mere touching of the clothes,” wrote Boccaccio, “appeared to itself to communicate the malady to the toucher.” The disease was also terrifyingly efficient. People who were perfectly healthy when they went to bed at night could be dead by morning.

Did you know? Many scholars think that the nursery rhyme “Ring around the Rosy” was written about the symptoms of the Black Death.

Understanding the Black Death

Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersinia  pestis . (The French biologist Alexandre Yersin discovered this germ at the end of the 19th century.)

They know that the bacillus travels from person to person through the air , as well as through the bite of infected fleas and rats. Both of these pests could be found almost everywhere in medieval Europe, but they were particularly at home aboard ships of all kinds—which is how the deadly plague made its way through one European port city after another.

Not long after it struck Messina, the Black Death spread to the port of Marseilles in France and the port of Tunis in North Africa. Then it reached Rome and Florence, two cities at the center of an elaborate web of trade routes. By the middle of 1348, the Black Death had struck Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and London.

Today, this grim sequence of events is terrifying but comprehensible. In the middle of the 14th century, however, there seemed to be no rational explanation for it.

No one knew exactly how the Black Death was transmitted from one patient to another, and no one knew how to prevent or treat it. According to one doctor, for example, “instantaneous death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy person standing near and looking at the sick.”

How Do You Treat the Black Death?

Physicians relied on crude and unsophisticated techniques such as bloodletting and boil-lancing (practices that were dangerous as well as unsanitary) and superstitious practices such as burning aromatic herbs and bathing in rosewater or vinegar.

Meanwhile, in a panic, healthy people did all they could to avoid the sick. Doctors refused to see patients; priests refused to administer last rites; and shopkeepers closed their stores. Many people fled the cities for the countryside, but even there they could not escape the disease: It affected cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens as well as people.

In fact, so many sheep died that one of the consequences of the Black Death was a European wool shortage. And many people, desperate to save themselves, even abandoned their sick and dying loved ones. “Thus doing,” Boccaccio wrote, “each thought to secure immunity for himself.”

Black Plague: God’s Punishment?

Because they did not understand the biology of the disease, many people believed that the Black Death was a kind of divine punishment—retribution for sins against God such as greed, blasphemy, heresy, fornication and worldliness.

By this logic, the only way to overcome the plague was to win God’s forgiveness. Some people believed that the way to do this was to purge their communities of heretics and other troublemakers—so, for example, many thousands of Jews were massacred in 1348 and 1349. (Thousands more fled to the sparsely populated regions of Eastern Europe, where they could be relatively safe from the rampaging mobs in the cities.)

Some people coped with the terror and uncertainty of the Black Death epidemic by lashing out at their neighbors; others coped by turning inward and fretting about the condition of their own souls.

Flagellants

Some upper-class men joined processions of flagellants that traveled from town to town and engaged in public displays of penance and punishment: They would beat themselves and one another with heavy leather straps studded with sharp pieces of metal while the townspeople looked on. For 33 1/2 days, the flagellants repeated this ritual three times a day. Then they would move on to the next town and begin the process over again.

Though the flagellant movement did provide some comfort to people who felt powerless in the face of inexplicable tragedy, it soon began to worry the Pope, whose authority the flagellants had begun to usurp. In the face of this papal resistance, the movement disintegrated.

How Did the Black Death End?

The plague never really ended and it returned with a vengeance years later. But officials in the port city of Ragusa were able to slow its spread by keeping arriving sailors in isolation until it was clear they were not carrying the disease—creating social distancing that relied on isolation to slow the spread of the disease.

The sailors were initially held on their ships for 30 days (a trentino ), a period that was later increased to 40 days, or a quarantine — the origin of the term “quarantine” and a practice still used today. 

Does the Black Plague Still Exist?

The Black Death epidemic had run its course by the early 1350s, but the plague reappeared every few generations for centuries. Modern sanitation and public-health practices have greatly mitigated the impact of the disease but have not eliminated it. While antibiotics are available to treat the Black Death, according to The World Health Organization, there are still 1,000 to 3,000 cases of plague every year.

Gallery: Pandemics That Changed History

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The Black Death and its Aftermath

• John Brooke

The Black Death was the second pandemic of bubonic plague and the most devastating pandemic in world history. It was a descendant of the ancient plague that had afflicted Rome, from 541 to 549 CE, during the time of emperor Justinian. The bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis , persisted for centuries in wild rodent colonies in Central Asia and, somewhere in the early 1300s, mutated into a form much more virulent to humans.

At about the same time, it began to spread globally. It moved from Central Asia to China in the early 1200s and reached the Black Sea in the late 1340s. Hitting the Middle East and Europe between 1347 and 1351, the Black Death had aftershocks still felt into the early 1700s. When it was over, the European population was cut by a third to a half, and China and India suffered death on a similar scale.

Traditionally, historians have argued that the transmission of the plague involved movement of plague-infected fleas from wild rodents to the household black rat. However, evidence now suggests that it must have been transmitted first by direct human contact with rodents and then via human fleas and head lice. This new explanation better explains the bacteria’s very rapid movement along trade routes throughout Eurasia and into sub-Saharan Africa.

At the time, people thought that the plague came into Mediterranean ports by ship. But, it is also becoming clear that small pools of plague had been established in Europe for centuries, apparently in wild rodent communities in the high passes of the Alps.

The remains of Bubonic plague victims in Martigues, France.

We know a lot about the impact of the Black Death from both the documentary record and from archaeological excavations. Within the last few decades, the genetic signature of the plague has been positively identified in burials across Europe.

The bacillus was deadly and took both rich and poor, rural and urban: the daughter of King Edward III of England died of the plague in the summer of 1348. But quickly—at least in Europe—the rich learned to barricade their households against its reach, and the poor suffered disproportionately.

Strikingly, if a mother survived the plague, her children tended to survive; if she died, they died with her. In the late 1340s, news of the plague spread and people knew it was coming: plague pits recently discovered in London were dug before the arrival of the epidemic.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1562 painting "The Triumph of Death" depicts the turmoil Europe experienced as a result of the plague.

The Black Death pandemic was a profound rupture that reshaped the economy, society and culture in Europe. Most immediately, the Black Death drove an intensification of Christian religious belief and practice, manifested in portents of the apocalypse, in extremist cults that challenged the authority of the clergy, and in Christian pogroms against Europe’s Jews.

This intensified religiosity had long-range institutional impacts. Combined with the death of many clergy, fears of sending students on long, dangerous journeys, and the fortuitous appearance of rich bequests, the heightened religiosity inspired the founding of new universities and new colleges at older ones.

The proliferation of new centers of learning and debate subtly undermined the unity of Medieval Christianity. It also set the stage for the rise of stronger national identities and ultimately for the Reformation that split Christianity in the 16 th century.

Depiction of the Great Plague of London in 1665 (left) . A copper engraving of a seventeenth-century plague doctor (right) .

The disruption caused by the plague also shaped new directions in medical knowledge. Doctors tending the sick during the plague learned from their direct experience and began to rebel against ancient medical doctrine. The Black Death made clear that disease was not caused by an alignment of the stars but from a contagion. Doctors became committed to a new empirical approach to medicine and the treatment of disease. Here, then, lie the distant roots of the Scientific Revolution.

Quarantines were directly connected to this new empiricism, and the almost instinctive social distancing of Europe’s middling and elite households. The first quarantine was established in 1377 at the Adriatic port of Ragussa. By the 1460s quarantines were routine in the European Mediterranean.

Major outbreaks of plague in 1665 and 1721 in London and Marseille were the result of breakdowns in this quarantine barrier. From the late 17th century to 1871 the Habsburg Empire maintained an armed “cordon sanitaire” against plague eruptions from the Ottoman Empire.

Michel Serre's painting depicting the 1721 plague outbreak in Marseille.

As with the rise of national universities, the building of quarantine structures against the plague was a dimension in the emergence of state power in Europe.

Through all of this turmoil and trauma, the common people who survived the Black Death emerged to new opportunities in emptied lands. We have reasonably good wage data for England, and wage rates rose dramatically and rapidly, as masters and landlords were willing to pay more for increasingly scarce labor.

The famous French historian Marc Bloch argued that medieval society began to break down at this time because the guaranteed flow of income from the labor of the poor into noble households ended with the depopulation of the plague. The rising autonomy of the poor contributed both to peasant uprisings and to late medieval Europe’s thinly disguised resource wars, as nobles and their men at arms attempted to replace rent with plunder.

A depiction of the 1381 Peasant's Revolt in England.

At the same time, the ravages of the Black Death decimated the ancient trade routes bringing spices and fine textiles from the East, ending what is known as the Medieval World System, running between China, India, and the Mediterranean.

By the 1460s, the Portuguese—elbowed out of the European resource wars—began a search for new ways to the East, making their way south along the African coast, launching an economic globalization that after 1492 included the Americas.

And we should remember that this first globalization would lead directly to another great series of pandemics, not the plague but chickenpox, measles, and smallpox, which in the centuries following Columbus’s landing would kill the great majority of the native peoples of the Americas.

In these ways we still live in a world shaped by the Black Death.

Black Death - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

There is probably no person who has not heard of the most devastating pandemics in history. This tragic epidemic is known as the Bubonic Plague. It ravaged Europe during the 14th century, leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake. Exploring this topic allows people to gain insight into the profound impact of this disease on society, culture, and medicine. If this theme is close to you, you can choose it among many other essay topics. As a sample paper, you can take someone’s research paper about the Black Death. There you can find valuable information about the origins of the bacteria that caused the plague. Alternatively, explore free essays about the Black Plague.

It is known that the infection of this disease spreads extremely quickly. It caused the death of 30% to 60% of infected people. Presenting such statistics in your text is an example that can be used for good hooks. A crucial element here is also the thesis statement for the Bubonic Plague. For instance, it could highlight the profound societal and economic upheaval caused by this deadliest pandemic. An essay on the Black Death is an opportunity to explore the social structure of the time, changes in medicine, and hygiene practices. Since a lot of literature has been written about this pandemic, you can easily find many examples to create a meaningful outline. Remember that the essay introduction and conclusion should reflect your thoughts and views on the topic.

Black Death DBQ

The Black Death happened in the context of immense trade network. It originated in China, in about 1346, but due to the many trade routes, it was able to spread to many parts of Europe and Asia in just 4 years. Large trade networks such as the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean trade have lots of people, from different backgrounds, travelling back and forth. The plague was composed of three parts; bubonic, pneumonic, septicemic, no matter what they had, […]

Famine and the Black Death

The famine set the stage in the Black Death, by infecting a lot of Europe's people into hunger and starvation. The famine made people more aware of what is happening around them and in European in the 1300's. Furthermore, in the 1347's, there was a horrible turning point that occurred in Europe called the Black Death. The plague began in a hot, dry summer, which caused a multitude of fleas and rats to come out from other places. The rats […]

Transition to a Better Life, a Better World

Viewing the world as is was from medieval to modern, there are various factors that conditioned the transition. The first part of knowing the factors of transition is the knowledge of when the transition took the first steps. The Renaissance, which is the improvement of economics and politics between the two time periods. This time came after Rome had fallen and the Black Death had swept the European region. The increase for wealth, land, and importance of political power, shaped […]

We will write an essay sample crafted to your needs.

The Black Death and its Effect on the Change in Medicine 

Historians have argued if the Black Death in the 13th century advanced science and medicine or if it was just a terrible plague that wiped out most of the European population. The Black Death did in fact bring many discoveries to most of Europe. The aftermath of the plague led to advancements of medications and swayed everyone from their hardcore beliefs. Medical practices went from being theoretical, based on their theories of the human body, to being more based on […]

The Black Death and the Effects on Society

Introduction The focus of my essay is on the Bubonic Plague also known as the Black Death that struck Europe in 1348, and its many effects on the daily lives of the people. Specifically understanding how the churches came to lose their influence over the European people due to the epidemic and the medical advances that came from this. It is interesting to see how drastically the people's beliefs changed from something that they so deeply believed in, and to […]

West out of the Dark Ages and Modern Western Society

There was a chain of events that brought the West out of the Dark Ages and into Modern Western Society. The term “the Dark Ages” is affiliated to the time period taking place in the European Middle Ages from 5th to 15th century AD. Firstly, the Dark ages started with the fall of the Roman Empire which was then followed by the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery with a few major events in between. All these events led the […]

The Spread of the Black Death

The Black Death was a catastrophic event that caused many people to die, because of 3 different strains of plague. The plague was so strong it killed almost 60 percent of Europe's population, around 25 million people. The most common plague people would get was the Bubonic plague. The Bubonic plague is a bacterial infection that is transmitted by fleas or rodents, causing inflammation in the victim's lymph node. It presented swollen lymph nodes that grew as large as a […]

The Black Death the Importance to World History

The Black Death was a monumental epidemic that took millions of lives and spread its devastation throughout Europe and Afro-Eurasia countries. This devastating event began in the 1330s and didn't end up dying out until the mid-1350s. It was an infectious disease that affected a large part of Afro-Eurasia in the mid-fourteenth century with millions of people dying from the Black Death. This brought about a great change in many ways from culture to the general way of life in […]

Columbus Day as a National Holiday

Its Columbus Day. Let's talk about history. Columbus day is actually on October 12th every year because that's the anniversary of when he reached America. But the reason we're celebrating Columbus day 4 days early this year is because congress changed the official date to the Second Monday of October in 1971. Incidentally, October 8th is the absolute earliest that Columbus Day can take place. The day didn't start off as Columbus Day. Initially it began in 1792 as the […]

Plague: the Black Death in Europe

The Black Death began in Europe in 1347 and had an estimated death toll if 75 to 200 million people. The Black Death, also known as the Bubonic Plague was carried by fleas living on the back of rats, which were normally found on the merchant ships. The plague reached Sicily in October 1347. People gathered on the docks were met with sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill, and covered in black boils […]

About the Black Death in History

Plague is one of the three epidemic diseases that is still a problem to the International Health Regulations and is reported by the World Health Organization. The bacteria Yersinia Pestis is said to be the agent that causes this disease. This type of bacteria is a zoonotic bacteria that is embedded in small animals and fleas (Plague, 2017).Yersenia Pestis bacteria is recognized by humans as being able of causing a pathogenic disease (Stenseth, et al., 2008). The plague has led […]

Muslims and Christians during the Black Death

As the Richter Scale measures earthquakes, the so-called ‘Foster Scale’ tries to quantify disasters. Conceived by Canadian geographer Harold D. Foster, it ranks calamities by tallying death tolls, physical damage, and emotional stress. According to Foster’s calculations, World War II (somewhat expectedly) tops the list of human disasters, but is closely followed by the Black Death, a plague epidemic of cataclysmic proportions, which repeatedly struck Europe in the second half of the fourteenth century. The disease wreaked such havoc that […]

Black Death in the Late Roman Empire

IN OCTOBER 1348, GENOESE TRADING SHIPS dropped anchor at the port of Messina, Sicily. The ships had come from the Black Sea port of Kaffa, now called Feodosiya. On board were goods from Central Asia, which was then controlled by the Mongol Empire. The sailors were afflicted with strange black swellings (buboes) the size of eggs that oozed blood and pus. These swellings followed by fevers, boils, and black blotches on the skin caused by internal bleeding, After four or […]

The Black Death and Ebola

In the 1300's a mysterious disease struck Europe, this disease was unknown to the people of Europe which left many people terrified. This mysterious disease spread throughout Europe like a wildfire and between 1347-1375 it infected European cities numerous times and virtually wiped out the European population (Fiero). Similar to this tragic ailment, a mysterious disease erupted in West Africa. In 2014 when this mysterious disease began to spread like the mystic disease in the 1300's it left many people […]

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Essay About Black Death Have you ever been so sick that it hurt just to move and technology did not provide a cure? The black death did that to people every day of the dark ages and it killed over one-third of the population. It was during the Renaissance Era so there were not many medicines for much of anything back then. Most people were using home remedies to try and cure their loved ones while getting infected with the same terrifying virus. They fought against the disease for their family instead of protecting themselves, and sadly for a lot of them, it cost them their lives. The Black Death killed many people and was a ruthless virus that stopped at nothing to kill everything in its path. The Black Death first came around in the early Renaissance period and wreaked havoc on the people of Europe and all over the eastern side of the world. It was transferred by fleas that came off of mice that came in on the ships that supplied towns. The fleas carried bacteria that resulted in an infection that later turned into the plague. The mice were the breeding ground for the fleas which spread the disease from person to person. ¨The Black Death is widely believed to have been the result of plague, caused by infection with the bacterium Yersinia pestis¨ (“Black Death”). (¨Pandemic in Medieval¨). It was believed to have been transferred from China and Asia destroying everything in its past as it rolled across the Earth. Having originated in China and Inner Asia, the Black Death decimated the army of the Kipchak Khan Jani Beg while he was besieging the Genoese Trading port of Kaffa (now Feodosiya) in Crimea (1347). With his forces disintegrating, Jani Beg catapulted plague-infested corpses into the town in an effort to infect his enemies (¨Pandemic in Medieval¨). The Chinese people used the plague to their advantage in battles with a village that had walls. They would catapult the bodies over the walls so that the people inside would be infected. It was a war tactic that worked really well, except for the flaw that the army that threw the bodies over was already infected. The armies or even civilians would also get sick by taking the clothes of the deceased, not knowing it would infect them because of the passengers on the fabric. This was another fatal mistake that helped in spreading the disease. The Black Death was not the only disease killing people during the renaissance period, but it was the most well-known. ¨Most infamous of all diseases of the time was the Black Death, a medieval pandemic that swept through Asia and Europe. It reached Europe in the late 1340s, killing an estimated 25 million people¨ (“Plague”). (National Geographic). The Bubonic Plague was relentless and the most common caused bubonic boils around the lymph nodes. ¨Bubonic plague, the disease's most common form, refers to telltale buboes—painfully swollen lymph nodes—that appear around the groin, armpit, or neck. Septicemic plague, which spreads in the bloodstream, comes either via fleas or from contact with plague-infected body matter¨ (National Geographic). The Plague does different things to different individuals, mostly because there are three types, but also because everyone's body works differently to protect itself. The third type of Plague is known as Pneumonic Plague and it is the most significant form of the disease. This form is the only form that can be transferred from person to person through air droplets. ¨Yersinia pestis is extraordinarily virulent, even when compared with closely related bacteria. This is because it is it's a mutant variety, handicapped both by not being able to survive outside the animals it infects and by an inability to penetrate and hide in its host's body cells¨ (National Geographic). The Bubonic Plague automatically makes everyone think of the Dark Ages whenever it is mentioned by anyone. ¨The very idea of the bubonic plague is something we associate with the Dark Ages when tens of millions were killed in the wake of the 'Black Death' which consumed Asia, Africa, and Europe in the 14th century¨ (Kugler). When the disease woke up, it did not intend to go back to sleep without causing too much hurt during the century. The disease is still around today but back then technology was not advanced enough to cure it as well as the recent medical technologies can. The reason it was such a deadly disease is that it traveled through the infected person´s lymphatic system. ¨When a human is infected with Y. pestis, the bacteria travel through the lymphatic system and end up in the lymph nodes where it causes painful, boil-like enlargements called buboes¨ (Kugler). These buboes were probably the most painful part of dying from this disease, and they would cause pain every time the person coughed, sneezed, or even moved.¨Without treatment, the bubonic plague will result in death in 60 percent to 90 percent of cases, usually within 10 days¨ (Kugler). In reality, the Bubonic Plague, or the Black Death as it is widely known, was an incredibly ruthless pathogen that spread across the European continent. It caused a lot of pain and suffering that could have been prevented with the current medicines we have today. Today’s technology has discovered that the Black Death could have could've been cured so easily if the right medicines existed back then. The world population at the time was severely threatened and a lot of the human species was decimated. All hope was lost and some people even thought that it was the end of times, but luckily, after years in turmoil, the disease lifted its hold on the human race.

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• Black Death

Essays on Black Death

Although people are struggling to find treatment for diseases like AIDS and cancer, the modern era is healthier compared to hundred years ago.  Human beings have come close to extinction through sicknesses like smallpox, Cholera, and Typhus. However, humanity has managed to withstand their effects and survive. A review of...

The impact of the Black Death on the arts in Fourteenth-Century Europe The historical period of the 1330s to 1340s experienced the greatest disaster in history. Europe was stricken by the deadly catastrophic plague that terminated the more than half the people in cities such as Venice.  The bubonic wave of...

People in the Middle Ages held that illness was brought on by sin or God's displeasure, so they thought that the Black Death was brought on by his wrath. People responded to the issue by turning to God for prevention because they believed that since God caused the disease, He...

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The Black Death and its Devastating Impact The Black Death was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, and it changed the course of European civilization forever. From 1346 to 1353, the plague killed an estimated 50 million people in Europe and the Mediterranean region, a devastating loss of life...

One of the most negative occurrences in human history was the Black Death pandemic. Between 1347 and 1350, it comprised a number of social, economic, and religious changes that had a tremendous impact on Europe. The annihilation of populations, which led to the deaths of between 30% and 60% of...

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Study reveals staggering toll of being Black in America: 1.6 million excess deaths over 22 years

Research has long shown that Black people live sicker lives and die younger than white people.

Now a new study, published Tuesday in JAMA , casts the nation’s racial inequities in stark relief, finding that the higher mortality rate among Black Americans resulted in 1.63 million excess deaths relative to white Americans over more than two decades.

Because so many Black people die young — with many years of life ahead of them — their higher mortality rate from 1999 to 2020 resulted in a cumulative loss of more than 80 million years of life compared with the white population, the study showed.

Although the nation made progress in closing the gap between white and Black mortality rates from 1999 to 2011, that advance stalled from 2011 to 2019. In 2020, the enormous number of deaths from Covid-19 — which hit Black Americans particularly hard — erased two decades of progress.

Authors of the study describe it as a call to action to improve the health of Black Americans, whose early deaths are fueled by higher rates of heart disease, cancer, and infant mortality.

“The study is hugely important for about 1.63 million reasons,” said Herman Taylor, an author of the study and director of the cardiovascular research institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine.

“Real lives are being lost. Real families are missing parents and grandparents,” Taylor said. “Babies and their mothers are dying. We have been screaming this message for decades.”

High mortality rates among Black people have less to do with genetics than with the country’s long history of discrimination, which has undermined educational, housing, and job opportunities for generations of Black people, said Clyde Yancy, an author of the study and chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

Black neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s — designated too “high risk” for mortgages and other investments — remain poorer and sicker today , Yancy said. Formerly redlined ZIP codes also had higher rates of Covid infection and death . “It’s very clear that we have an uneven distribution of health,” Yancy said. “We’re talking about the freedom to be healthy.”

A companion study estimates that racial and ethnic inequities cost the U.S. at least $421 billion in 2018, based on medical expenses, lost productivity, and premature death.

In 2021, non-Hispanic white Americans had a life expectancy at birth of 76 years, while non-Hispanic Black Americans could expect to live only to 71 . Much of that disparity is explained by the fact that non-Hispanic Black newborns are 2½ times as likely to die before their first birthdays as non-Hispanic whites. Non-Hispanic Black mothers are more than 3 times as likely as non-Hispanic white mothers to die from a pregnancy-related complication. (Hispanic people can be of any race or combination of races.)

Racial disparities in health are so entrenched that even education and wealth don’t fully erase them, said Tonia Branche, a neonatal-perinatal medicine fellow at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago who was not involved in the JAMA study.

Black women with a college degree are more likely to die from pregnancy complications than white women without a high school diploma. Although researchers can’t fully explain this disparity, Branche said it’s possible that stress, including from systemic racism, takes a greater toll on the health of Black mothers than previously recognized.

Death creates ripples of grief throughout communities. Research has found that every death leaves an average of nine people in mourning.

Black people shoulder a great burden of grief, which can undermine their mental and physical health, said Khaliah Johnson, chief of pediatric palliative care at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Given the high mortality rates throughout the life span, Black people are more likely than white people to be grieving the death of a close family member at any point in their lives.

“We as Black people all have some legacy of unjust, unwarranted loss and death that compounds with each new loss,” said Johnson, who was not involved with the new study. “It affects not only how we move through the world, but how we live in relationship with others and how we endure future losses.”

Johnson’s parents lost two sons — one who died a few days after birth and another who died as a toddler. In an essay published last year , Johnson recalled, “My parents asked themselves on numerous occasions, ‘Would the outcomes for our sons have been different, might they have received different care and lived, had they not been Black?’”

Johnson said she hopes the new study gives people greater understanding of all that’s lost when Black people die prematurely. “When we lose these lives young, when we lose that potential, that has an impact on all of society,” she said.

And in the Black community, “our pain is real and deep and profound, and it deserves attention and validation,” Johnson said. “It often feels like people just pass it over, telling you to stop complaining. But the expectation can’t be that we just endure these things and bounce back.”

Teleah Scott-Moore said she struggles with the death of her 16-year-old son, Timothy, an athlete who hoped to attend Boston College and study sports medicine. He died of sudden cardiac arrest in 2011, a rare condition that kills about 100 young athletes a year. Research shows that an underlying heart condition that can lead to sudden cardiac death, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, often goes unrecognized in Black patients.

Scott-Moore still wonders if she should have recognized warning signs. She also has blamed herself for failing to protect her two younger sons, who found Timothy’s body after he collapsed.

At times, Scott-Moore said, she wanted to give up.

Instead, she said, the family created a foundation to promote education and health screenings to prevent such deaths. She hears from families all over the world, and supporting them has helped heal her pain.

“My grief comes back in waves, it comes back when I least expect it,” said Scott-Moore, of Baltimore County, Maryland. “Life goes on, but it’s a pain that never goes away.”

KFF Health News , formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

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Black Americans experienced 1.6 million excess deaths compared to White population over 22-year period, study finds

By Sara Moniuszko , Danya Bacchus

Edited By Paula Cohen

Updated on: May 16, 2023 / 3:57 PM EDT / CBS News

Despite years of efforts to reduce health disparities , a new study is calling attention to the drastic differences in mortality that continue to take a toll among Black Americans.

Researchers found the Black population in the United States experienced more than 1.63 million excess deaths — and more than 80 million excess years of life lost — compared to the White population over a recent 22-year period, from 1999 through 2020. 

"After a period of progress in reducing disparities, improvements stalled, and differences between the Black population and the white population worsened in 2020," the authors write in the study, published Tuesday in the medical journal JAMA . 

"Heart disease had the highest excess mortality rates, and the excess years of potential life lost rates were largest among infants and middle-aged adults," the study notes.

Along with heart disease in both men and women, cancer, especially in males, was a major driver of differences in excess deaths. 

Excess deaths are typically defined as the "difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time periods and expected numbers of deaths in the same time periods," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"All the disadvantage that Black people incur ends up being translated both at very young ages and in middle age and older age into enormous amounts of years lost in early death. And this is really, I think, something that's unacceptable," Dr. Harlan Krumholz, an author of the study with Yale School of Medicine, told CBS News.

Race is a social construct, he adds, meaning it doesn't have a strong root in biology. 

"People aren't born predetermined that their life expectancies are going to be shorter, but by where they live, the exposures that they have, the way the medical care system treats them simply because of their race," he says.

In 2020, the last year included in the study, COVID-19 emerged as a leading cause of death that also took a disproportionate toll on Black Americans . COVID had the highest age-adjusted excess mortality rate among Black men that year and was second-highest, after heart disease, among Black women.

"It led us back to a situation where we were no better than we were 20 years ago," Krumholz says. "These are preventable deaths and it's just up to us to configure society in a way that's responsive to the needs of this community and can recognize our obligation to eliminate these disparities "

The authors say these findings show the need to assess progress and indicates a need for new approaches to promote health equity in the U.S. They also called out the troubling impact of health disparities on children.

"The sobering disparity noted in this study among infants and during childhood accounted for a markedly elevated number of excess deaths and an even more pronounced disparity in years of potential life lost," they wrote.

Using national data from the CDC, the study focused on differences between non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic White populations to understand recent trends in disparities between these two specific groups.  "Subsequent studies using data from other racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups would be needed to have a complete understanding of mortality inequities in the U.S." the authors note.

Racial disparities in health outcomes and death rates have been seen in a number of specific areas in prior studies.

The number of women who die during or shortly after childbirth, for example, is higher in the U.S. than any other developed nation, particularly among women of color.  

Determining the cause of that racial disparity poses "essentially one of the biggest challenges of public health," Dr. Henning Tiemeier, the director of Harvard's Maternal Health Task Force, told CBS News' "Face the Nation" last year. Every year in the U.S., roughly 700 women die while in labor or within the first month of giving birth, Tiemeier said, noting that most of these deaths are "preventable."

"We see that as a top of the iceberg of poor health in women and poor health in Black women," Tiemeier added. "And there are several reasons, there seems to (be), from poverty to discrimination to poor care for this group of women."

Sara Moniuszko is a health and lifestyle reporter at CBSNews.com. Previously, she wrote for USA Today, where she was selected to help launch the newspaper's wellness vertical. She now covers breaking and trending news for CBS News' HealthWatch.

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