I'm not dead!! I think I'll go for a walk!
Posted on 08/01/2007 2:00:38 PM PDT by blam
Several months ago, I was doing some genealogy research on my late husband’s ancestors. I discovered that 2 of them had died of this and it took 3 weeks for the officials to say what killed them. The site said that whole towns were wiped out and there were not any people left to bury the dead. It was a devastating time in England’s history.
Uhhh, since the Black Death hit EVERYWHERE in Europe, the same situation should be true there too.
Is it?
I, too, spent a day reading about the Black Death and it was mesmerizing, I couldn’t tear myself away from the books. There was almost a poetic quality to the era - a concentrated vivid dose of death, everything drenched with morbidity
I got interested in the Cult of Death, which romaticized death and gave it artistic expression. Perhaps a very human response to what the medievals could not control.
But ... hey a shot of pencillin beats the danse macabre any day.
The Black Death is known by that name because of its penchant to turn corpses black, and putrifactant, within an hour or so (not because it was a dark and hysterically period of black satire). I mean even so it was all of that, that is NOT the reason that the plague was known as the "Black" death. Neither was the "black" death something that the KKK dreamed up (despite their best dreams in that regard).
No, the Black Death was reference to now one died; and it wasn't pretty. Let me tell you this: when your grapefruit sized lymph glands underneath your armpits, and lining your groin ruptured with puss and virulence and putrefaction: then you knew why it was called the Black Death. The survivors then witnessed the corpse turning totally black and putryfying within seemingly "minutes". hence the nomenclaute for the plague being Black Death (all the rest being merely mood-candy).
Killing cats led to a rat spread disease? Makes sense.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I’ll add it to my reading list.
Thanks.
Ping.
I'm not dead!! I think I'll go for a walk!
I wholeheartely agree, especially when I have to visit the dentist. I had back surgery, a minor procedure by today’s standards, in 1988. If I had been born 100 years earlier, I would have been confined to a wheelchair with the same condition. There’s so much that we take for granted these days.
Once the Black Death was understood to come from fleas some interesting fashions arose from it. One was a large, white frill collar people wore which was meant to show others they didn't have fleas since they'd fall into the frills and be visible to others. You've probably seen people wearing them in many old portraits. Another was lap dogs which were especially useful in public as the dog's higher body temperature would draw fleas to the dog rather than the owner.
Well, it hit pretty hard in parts of the Mediterranean area.
What parts of Europe escaped it?
There was an article here a while back about it being possibly connected to a form of Ebola.
Close. A nation of inbred islamofascists...
that actually gives me hope
Arabs are very inbred.
Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
...Rolling Rock?
...Rolling Rock?
I've never drunk that much of it... /grin
Green is the signature color of the various Islamist terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, etc. Check out pictures of them with their green bandanas, flags, etc.
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