I found an article that summarized the book nicely, but there is a problem with the theory. At the time that the book came to print, the research on the mass graves from Black Death was sketchy at best.
Five years later a very serious project was set up to hunt for Plague in multiple different regions across the world. And they found it.
It is conclusive that Black Death was Plague.
HOWEVER, what I found interesting were the reasons that the authors thought it was Ebola (or something like that). The Black Death did not move like Plague. It didn’t have all of the same characteristics of the Plague that we know today.
And there’s a reason for that. There were three different strains of Plague that caused the epidemic. Slight genetic variations exist between those three strains and what we have now.
The bad part is that the Black Death did behave, in many ways, like Ebola as it moved through a population. (Rates of transmission, length of the infectious stage, some of the symptoms were similar to some hemorrhagic fevers, etc)
From what I’ve read, Ebola has a very good chance of following the patterns of the Black Death.
In a world with ebola spreading somehow cancer just doesn’t seem that scary anymore.
Cancer runs in my family and I’ve had quite a few scares. Ijust had oral surgery to remove suspect tissue from my tongue(benign yay!)
This ebola seems far scarier.
Maybe because cancer isn’t contageous