By: Conor O’Malley

As a health care policy intern, I have been looking for connections to the area I am working in and the classes I am taking. Coincidentally, I was lucky enough to stumble upon a topic that sparked my interest, and thought I could take the time to share with you today.

It is 1347 to 1350 Europe, grungy, dirty, unregulated Europe. To put the year into context, it is about 153 years before Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, and 251 years after the sack of Jerusalem in the first crusade, and the Hundred Years’ War is currently going on.

However, there is a force coming from the Far East that Europe would not have ever seen coming. It was not a sword, axe, pike, or trident that would prove to be the harbinger of death to Europe, but a bacterium. A tiny, microscopic, bacteria brought the continent to its knees, almost utterly destroying the population of Europe.

Originating in Asia, after festering for several centuries, it travelled from the Northern Black Sea region through the cites of Mediterranean Europe. Constantinople, Sicily, Cairo, Jerusalem, Florence, and others were cities that were made into stepping stones for the disease to take root and spread.

The disease had two main carriers, the xenopsylla cheopis, or flea, or the pasteurella pestis, a bacteria. The flea transported the plague from attaching to dogs, rats, and even people, effectively spreading it quickly in densely populated areas. The bacterium on the other hand, could take different forms, depending on where it attacked the human body.

The Black Death could be broken down into three different plagues, which is why it was such a massive and disaserous event. The Bubonic plague is the most commonly known of the three. It localized in the skin and was spread when the skin broke from scratching, rubbing, etc, and then touching something else. The Pneumonic plague is when the bacteria attacked and localized in the lungs. It was extremely contagious, spreading from coughing, breathing, sneezing and any other respiratory actions. The septicemic plague was the most danger of the three. It was when the blood of a person became infected by the virus. This version was so dangerous a person could die within hours while showing no symptoms whatsoever.

Luckily, the people of Europe had advanced medicine where they could combat the disease…. Oh wait… no they didn’t.

The 14th century ‘medical field’ was still basing medical facts from Hippocrates in the 4th century before the common era (BC). Doctors, a gracious term, did not know about the blood flow within the human body yet. It sometimes was safer to not go see a trained physician and rather wait out whatever sickness you have. As an example of one way doctors though one could defeat diseases was to do a procedure called ‘blood letting.’ This involved a doctor literally bleeding a patient for a certain amount of time because they felt that pain and disease was an imbalance of bodily elements inside the body.

With the lack of knowledge, this lead the people of Europe to come to some fantastically rash conclusions. People became worried that simple eye contact with someone who has the disease was enough to spread it to another person. In addition, the pious believed it was a punishment from God, and it was the peoples’ who died fault, because God wanted them to be dead. This lead to the idea of self punishment, where people would try and literally beat the sin out of themselves.

Economically it devastated the continent. It killed 1/3 of the population, especially in the areas around the Mediterranean. Of the people killed by the disease, many of them were the workers, and serfs who worked the lands; which made the land value drop drastically. Therefore the serfs became a valuable asset to the European community. This gave them leverage to hold over landowners, where they could bargain for their freedom or even for some of their own land. After the Black Death the overall population of Europe was static but then recovered and began to eventually return to a normal increase.

Luckily, the strain of bacteria was discovered and identified in the 19th century. So we don’t have to worry about another Black Death coming around anytime soon; and even if it did, we could make an effective vaccine. My point in writing this post is to realize that even though we do have a flawed medical system, in the U.S. today, we actually have a medical system. We have doctors (who [generally] know what they are doing), medicine, machines to run tests, and hospitals to take proper and effective care for us. So whether you are for free health care, privatized or public, I think we should first appreciate the fact that we have a medical system to begin with. This we can all agree on.