An ABC of plague

A is for abracadabra

Wandering around the plague-ravaged streets of London in 1665, Daniel Defoe saw nothing but fools. Everywhere he looked, the author of Robinson Crusoe author found “people deceiv’d … Papers tied up with so many Knots; and certain Words, or Figures written on them, as particularly the Word Abracadabra.”

Later, Defoe tried to make a living harvesting musk from the anal glands of cats. So it’s unclear who died and made him the arbiter of what’s stupid and what’s not.  

Anyway. Plague-stricken Londoners chanting ‘abracadabra’ were the latest in a long line of desperate people to invoke the magic word. ‘Abracadabra’ probably began life as a folk cure well before it appeared in an Ancient Roman medical text. According to this text, healers should write the word on a piece of papyrus and hang it around their patients’ necks to cool their fevers.

Failing that, “coral and saffron wrapped in cat’s skin has a virtue not less marvellous.”

B is for bubonic

Fever? Chills? Headache? It’s likely you have bubonic plague. 

Bubonic is the kind of plague we’re most familiar with – it’s the one that ravaged Europe from the 1347 Black Death to the Great Plague of the seventeenth century. 

You may also have pneumonic or septicemic plague, but in either case you’d probably already be dead. Bubonic plague is a little more coy, taking a few days to kick in. As it stands, you’re looking at just over a week – max. So, go on. Tell that second cousin how you feel. Take that touch typing course. 

C is for centuries

Well, the inhabitants of Europe said to each other in 1351, when the Black Death had run its course. That was uncomfortable. 75–125 million, gone. Dust. Finished. But why dwell on the past? What’s done is done. All’s well that ends well. Opposites attract and so on. 

But as much as they tried to get on with scything things and thinking about Jesus, the pestilence just kept coming back – for centuries. 

Lots of scholars disagree with the French historian Jean-Noël Biraben, who says there wasn’t a single year between 1346 and 1671 when plague wasn’t ravaging some part of Europe. But I like a bit of drama, so I’m with Birabin. And it’s true that in the seventeenth century alone – the last ‘big plague’ era – London lost 100,000 people, France lost a million and Italy lost almost two million.  

In fact, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that plague well and truly receded and Europeans could relax and get on with having syphilis.

D is for Draconian

Planning on stealing a cabbage in Ancient Greece? Neither. But it’s always nice to have options. And if you wanted to have a good time in seventh-century BC Athens, your options were limited.  

The Athenian legislator Draco thought that any small offence – from vegetable theft to idleness – deserved the death penalty. And he wouldn’t let you go gently with a cup of hemlock and a nice sleep either. Under Draco’s watch, you’d be fastened to a board and have iron collars clamped around your wrists, ankles and neck. Then, your executioner would tighten the collar on your neck until you carked it. 

Draco’s own death wasn’t a picnic either. One day at the theatre, his supporters threw so many hats and shirts and cloaks at him that he suffocated to death. Apparently it was an accident. Apparently throwing clothes at leaders was a totally normal way for Ancient Greeks to show their fealty – totally normal and not passive aggressive at all.  

Anyway, that’s where we get ‘draconian’, a word we use to describe parking inspectors, quarantines during plague outbreaks and the restrictions we’re experiencing today as a result of COVID-19. 

E is for epidemic

Strangely enough, ‘epidemic’ originally meant something nice: homecoming. It comes from epi, which means ‘among’, and demos, which means ‘the people’ or ‘the country in which the people live’. 

Homer used it first, to mean one who arrives back home after a voyage. Later, Demosthenes used it to describe a stranger entering a city. Then Sophocles tweaked it even further, to refer to something that spreads across a country. By then, its meaning was close enough to today’s for Hippocrates to describe a disease that propagates in a given place as an epidemic.

F is for flagellant

When the Black Death erupted in Europe in 1347, the flagellants weren’t too worried. If they could pre-emptively punish themselves, they reasoned, God wouldn’t feel the need to add to that punishment with plague. So, they would walk around the countryside, recite a few liturgies and lash themselves with nail-studded whips. 

“Oh,” they hoped God would say, as He retracted His plague-filled hand. “Those flagellants, they’re clearly sorted. I guess there’s no point my sticking around here. Off to Bulgaria then.”

But the flagellants’ constant travel meant they kept spreading plague into new areas. Also, they screamed alot. So, after a while, country people got a bit annoyed with the flagellants and sent them on their sad way.  

G is for Great Fire of London

Want to cure plague, but what with work, pilates and an overflowing inbox you’re running short of time? What you need is a Great Fire of London.  

It’s simple. First, wait until plague has so ravaged your city that 100,000 are dead and everyone else is traumatised. Then, start a little something in a CBD bakery – any one will do. Blow on it until you’ve got a firestorm. 

Next, double check your city’s buildings are made of wood and all the roofs are made of straw. And, if you’ve just had a civil war, don’t be shy about scattering some gunpowder around the city. Hell, why not store a few tonnes of it in flammable wooden barrels by the wharf? 

With this one simple trick, you can incinerate the whole plague-infested city and destroy the homes of almost all its inhabitants. It worked for London. After the Great Fire of 1666, plague never returned. 

H is for hocus pocus

Today we use ‘hocus pocus’ as an insult to fling at quacks and psychics. But despite being much more open to magic than us, plague-riddled Londoners used ‘hocus pocus’ as an insult too. Except they weren’t making fun of witches, they were making fun of Catholics.

As they held the wafer of Christ’s body, Catholics would say hoc est corpus meum, Latin for ‘this is my body’. Protestants thought this was nonsense – according to them, the wafer simply represented rather than was Christ’s body. So, they made fun of Catholics by repeating hoc est corpus meum in funny voices. After a while, the words got so jumbled they became ‘hocus pocus’. 

I is for isolation

During the Great Plague of 1665, London’s authorities bolted the sick – and any healthy housemates – inside their homes for up to six weeks. Watchmen would guard their front doors, which were marked with red crosses, to make sure no-one escaped. 

People were left inside to look at the rotting corpses of their family members, whom they couldn’t go outside to bury. Friends couldn’t visit and neither could clergy. Meanwhile, a lot of healthy people starved – authorities didn’t provide any food for the quarantined. 

Basically, people had to fend for themselves. So, it makes sense that the word ‘isolation’ derives from the Latin insulatus – which means, quite literally, to make an island of yourself. 

J is for Journal of the Plague Year

Remember Daniel Defoe, who got so angry about Londoners and their abracabras? I found Defoe’s complaint in Journal of the Plague Year, his eyewitness account of the 1665 outbreak in London. 

In the book, Defoe writes about some of the concerns that weighed on his mind that year.

“My trade was a saddler …  I was a single man, ‘tis true, but I had a family of servants whom I kept at my business; had a house, shop, and warehouses filled with goods … I went home that evening greatly oppressed in my mind, irresolute, and not knowing what to do.”

 What’s odd is that Defoe was born in 1660. Which puts him at just five years old during the outbreak. Pretty screwed up kid, huh?

K is for kindness

In 1665, nobody wanted to nurse the victims of plague. Authorities actually had to recruit condemned prisoners for the job on the promise of a pardon. Neighbours and relatives stopped visiting the sick and the grieving had no one to comfort them. According to Samuel Pepys, who kept an actual journal in 1665, plague was “making us as cruel as dogs to one another”. 

Kindness is often the first casualty of contagious disease outbreaks. And to be unkind actually means to not recognise someone as family. ‘Kind’ comes from ‘kin’ and originally had a meaning similar to ‘species’. We still use it this way when we talk about “the same kind of people” or “that kind of chocolate”. But the two meanings are really one and the same. Acting kindly means treating someone as if they’re your relative – recognising that you and they are one of a kind.

L is for lucky charm

So, you’ve got plague. What’s next? 

 Maybe you want to whip yourself with studded ropes and maybe you don’t. Heck, we’re all different, and that’s what makes life so darn interesting. But why not take a gentler route and invest in some lucky charms?

Daniel Defoe ‘remembers’ Londoners wearing exorcisms, amulets and signs of the zodiac all through the 1665 outbreak. But if you’re fresh out of amulets, seventeenth-century Londoners would tell you that many other household objects can moonlight as lucky charms. Hare’s feet piling up? Dried toads everywhere you look? Up to your ears in hardened clumps of indigestible matter from your goat’s intestines? Use them all! 

Or, if you’re short on dead reptiles and dismembered bunnies, simply take a chicken, pluck out all its feathers, and rub the bird on your plague sores until it dies. It might not work, but it’ll sure be weird. 

M is for Mongols

Before the Black Death reached Europe in 1347, it was busy killing about 25 million people in Central Asia. In Kyrgyzstan, squashed between present-day China and Uzbekistan, archaeologists have found inscriptions on graves from as early as 1338 that refer to the disease.

At the time, Kyrgyzstan was part of the Mongol empire. But the Mongols weren’t satisfied with Kyrgyzstan – and can you blame them? So even with plague raging through their army, they continued to travel abroad looking for new places to conquer. And in doing so, they – and plenty of other people, like traders – brought plague all the way from the eastern end of the Silk Road right through to Europe. 

Legend has it that during a drawn-out siege of Kaffa, the fed-up Mongol army decided to catapult their comrades’ plague-infested corpses over the Crimean city’s walls. As well as infecting the people of Kaffa, the corpses infected traders visiting from Genoa, too, who quickly brought plague back to Sicily. 

N is for Norway

Even at the peak of the Black Death, people still needed to trade. Jobs and growth, don’t you know? But foreign merchant ships had to comply with their destination’s quarantine requirements. In many ports this meant staying offshore for 40 days before pulling in. 

 To obey this rule, a ship’s crew needed to be alive. And when a vessel of English merchants arrived in Norway, it failed to meet this basic requirement. During the journey, every crew member had sickened and ultimately died of plague. 

 When the empty ship ran ashore in Bergen, plague-infested rats were its only cargo. They skipped right out into the country, distributing the disease into every alley and attic with glee. Before long, a third of all Norwegians were dead.

O is for ostracise

Whether they were being pelted by rotten fruit in a market they’d travelled to from a plague-ridden area, or locked up inside a corpse-strewn hovel, plague gave most of its victims a fair bit of experience with ostracism.

 But where does the word ‘ostracism’ come from? Has it got anything to do with the ostrich, that poorly understood, often-shunned bird? 

 Actually, it comes from ceramics. For reasons obscure to me and probably to them as well, Ancient Greeks like to express themselves through shards of broken pottery. They called these shards ostrakon.

When they wanted to banish someone, they would etch that person’s name onto a bit of ostrakon. Officials would count up the ostrakon and, if enough shards bore the same person’s name, that person would be ostrakizein – or, ostracised.

P is for perfume

Even though it’s done exactly nothing ever, aromatherapy was a thriving industry in seventeenth-century London and remains so today.  

During the Great Plague, people would place sponges soaked in vinegar and camphor around their houses, hoping the vapours would ward off plague. If the disease had already hit, they would purify the air of infected dwellings with rosemary, bay and juniper. 

The neat thing was, if it didn’t work, housewife-cum-gravediggers could save time and money by recycling the herbs. Because rosemary’s heady fragrance lingers so long, people back then would use it in funeral processions – it reminded them to keep the dead in their prayers. They also used bay leaves to adorn coffins. Apparently dead bay trees can revive from their roots, so to them, bay leaves symbolised resurrection. Good in soup, too. 

Q is for quarantine

It’s not all gondolas and ice-creams over in Venice. Sometimes those northern Italians mean business. And it’s them we have to thank for quarantine.  

As a busy trading port welcoming ships from all over infected Asia and the Middle East, Venice was one of the first cities to succumb to the Black Death in 1347. After the outbreak, Venetian officials were understandably keen on it never happening again. So, from 1377, they ordered all ships coming from plague-stricken areas to stay offshore for 40 days, or quaranta giorni. 

Only after quaranta giorni had passed with no latent cases of plague emerging could ships unload their goods in Venice. As the practice became more widespread so did the term, and it’s from there we get the word ‘quarantine’. 

R is for Rattus rattus

Everyone knows that rats were the major culprit behind plague. Except that they weren’t. Not in England. 

We got this idea from nineteenth-century scientists studying an 1894 plague outbreak in Hong Kong. In that instance, the black rat – Rattus rattus – was at fault. So, the scientists assumed it must have caused every historical European outbreak too. But it didn’t add up. 

In England, plague had always ravaged the countryside. But Rattus rattus isn’t a rural pest. Scientists can find absolutely no trace of it in the poo of seventeenth-century owls from the English countryside, which they investigated for some reason. Plus, architectural historians know that farmers only began to guard their buildings against rats in the nineteenth century, when the Norwegians got their own back by sending the brown rat – Rattus norvegicus – to English shores.

And no one knows how to explain Iceland, which despite having no rat population to speak of, still experienced many plague outbreaks. Or why quarantine worked to contain the disease even though it’s obviously useless against rodents.

The only answer is that other animals can transmit plague too. In fact, scientists have discovered that even soil can act as a reservoir for plague bacteria. 

S is for scent

Rector Mompesson of Eyam knew his wife had succumbed to plague when they were out walking the fields and she exclaimed, “Oh Mompesson, the air! How sweet it smells!” This quotation is fake, but the story is probably true. In the initial wash of sickness, plague’s victims often perceive phantom bouquets. Biologists say it’s caused by necrosis of their internal organs. 

Plague sores, called buboes, emit a strangely sweet smell too. That’s because they contain a chemical called trimethylamine – which you can also find in fragrant spring flowers like the hawthorn blossom.

T is for thoughts and prayers

The most effective cure for plague is running away from it as quickly as possible. That’s what King Charles II did in 1665, and it worked a treat. Failing that, seventeenth-century Londoners could have a Marlboro. As well as relieving stress, tobacco could cure plague. That’s what doctors said, anyway.    

If their plague was so bad that they could barely breathe, let alone smoke, the ailing might try some other popular cures. One of these was sitting in a sewer. Another was rubbing chopped-up snake on their buboes. Or, crushing any minerals they had at hand and gobbling them up. After giving all of these a whack, an early modern Londoner might also – politely – ask their doctor to taste their urine, just to see how they were getting on. 

U is for underground

Many Londoners have noticed that the underground tube rarely takes the most direct route from A to B. Some historians chalk this up to plague pits. They say that nineteenth-century engineers building the railway either didn’t want to disturb the dead (and potentially expose themselves to pestilence) or couldn’t drill through the densely packed bodies. 

In her 2006 book Necropolis, Catharine Arnold writes: 

“Excavations for the Piccadilly Line between Knightsbridge and South Kensington underground stations unearthed a pit so dense with human remains that it could not be tunnelled through. This is said to account for the curving nature of the track between the two stations.”

Boringly, the tracks actually meander to avoid private properties. Railway designers preferred to dig under publicly owned roads to save the cost of buying up private land. 

But Catharine’s version has been repeated so many times that most people think it’s true. And I for one fully intend to keep repeating it. But even Catharine herself admits it was just something her ex-boyfriend once mentioned in passing. 

V is for virus

The awkward thing about plague – one of the awkward things about plague – is that not everyone agrees it actually happened. 

Every scholar accepts that a horrendous disease broke out in 1347, killing over half of Europe’s population and haunting the continent for centuries afterwards. But they’re not all sure it was bubonic plague. 

Instead, some scientists think it might have been a virus like Ebola. This is partly because viruses pass from person to person more easily than bacterial diseases like plague, which rely on transmission by rodents and fleas. And plague did seem to jump between people – but then again, so do fleas. 

Scientists are also confused about why so many Europeans have a gene that makes them immune to some viruses. A whole ten per cent of today’s European population is genetically resistant to HIV infection, for instance. And the mutation that bred this immunity could only have occurred in response to a massive viral attack. Strangely enough, the mutation first appeared around 700 years ago – the exact time the Black Death arrived in Europe. 

That said, the Black Death devastated Asia too, and its inhabitants haven’t got the same viral immunity today. Unlucky!

W is for witches

The Black Death transformed the lives of Europeans. With two-thirds of the population gone, peasants were in short enough supply to demand better living and working conditions from their lords. This ended serfdom – the medieval version of slavery – for good. And it was good. But it also upset the well-established social order, which only contributed to the general mood of uneasiness.  

At the same time, many people felt their faith in the church beginning to slip. Soon new ways of thinking, like humanism, popped up. Ultimately, there would be a schism in the medieval church that would see Catholics and Protestants spend hundreds of years and millions of lives at war with each other.  

Adding to all this uncertainty, Europeans had lost their husbands and wives and sons and daughters. They could try out every new position under the sun but still, the population wouldn’t recover to pre-plague levels until the 1600s. In some parts of the continent, it would take until the 1800s.

And for once, Europeans had no-one to take their frustrations out on. During the Black Death, Christians had accused at least 235 Jewish communities in Europe of poisoning the wells with plague and had massacred hundreds. These pogroms and expulsions forced many Jews to flee east to Poland and Russia. 

So maybe that’s one reason why, starting in the fifteenth century, Europeans executed about 40,000 witches. Maybe it was just a case of needing a new scapegoat.  

X is for Xenopsylla cheopis

No flea ever set out to give us plague. In its own disgusting way, Xenopyslla cheopis – the Oriental rat flea – was as much a victim of the disease as anyone else. 

Fleas only give us plague after they’ve been infected by another creature. When this happens, plague bacteria multiply inside their tiny stomachs until they’re so blocked up they can’t take in any more food. When they do attempt to feed, they simply regurgitate the bacteria into whoever they’re feeding on. And because they’re so hungry and frustrated, they’ll try to feed more often than usual, intensifying the disease’s spread.

Unfortunately for us, plague takes a while to kill fleas. Plus, they can survive for over a week between feeds. This probably explains how the small English village of Eyam succumbed to plague in 1665. One day, a journeyman tailor named George Viccars received a box of cloth from London. About a week after opening it up, he died. And within a year, 80 per cent of his neighbours in Eyam were dead too. All because a little flea in his box of cloth had gone too long without a feed. 

Y is for Yersinia pestis

Ever heard of Shibasaburo pestis? Neither. That’s because even though Baron Kitasato Shibasaburo discovered the infectious agent of bubonic plague, Alexandre Yersin discovered it too, a couple of days later. Probably because Yersinia pestis is – let’s face it – catchier, Shibasaburo didn’t get any of the credit.

But not all historians think Yersin was so great. Some argue that Yersinia pestis is just too mild to cause the rapid and nearly always fatal sicknesses that engulfed Europe from 1347 onward. A few of them, as we saw, suggest that it was a virus instead. But others wonder if the plague was actually just a series of widespread anthrax infections, which cause boils similar to plague buboes.

We know for a fact that many rural markets in the period sold anthrax-infected beef, and archaeologists have even discovered anthrax spores in a Scottish plague pit. But we’ve also seen Yersinia pestis identified in so many exhumed bodies over the past decade that today, the scholarship seems fairly settled.

Z is for zoonotic

Plague is a zoonotic disease, which means it entered the human population via animals. But #notallanimals. What didn’t cause it were cats and dogs, something seventeenth-century Londoners got wrong when they killed hundreds of thousands of them on the mayor’s orders, incidentally eliminating some of the rat’s only predators. 

 COVID-19, which seemed to enter the human population in a live animal market in Wuhan last November, is another zoonotic disease. As is Ebola – it usually spreads after a person comes into direct contact with an infected wild animal or fruit bat. The same holds true of leprosy, which we all know is best avoided by steering clear of infected armadillos. A real drag for our social lives, but there it is. 

As we raze more wild areas and come into contact with all sorts of species we’ve never met before, we’re also going to encounter more zoonotic diseases we’ve got no immunity to. So, if it’s not plague or coronavirus, something else will get you soon enough!