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Many have claimed the Justinianic Plague (c. 541-750 CE) killed half of the population of Roman Empire. Now, historical research and mathematical modeling challenge the death rate and severity of this first plague pandemic... White and Mordechai focused their efforts on the city of Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, which had a comparatively well-described outbreak in 542 CE. Some primary sources claim plague killed up to 300,000 people in the city, which had a population of some 500,000 people at the time. Other sources suggest the plague killed half the empire's population. Until recently, many scholars accepted this image...

<p>In early April, writer Jen Miller urged New York Times readers to start a coronavirus diary.</p> <p>“Who knows,” she wrote, “maybe one day your diary will provide a valuable window into this period.”</p> <p>During a different pandemic, one 17th-century British naval administrator named Samuel Pepys did just that. He fastidiously kept a diary from 1660 to 1669 – a period of time that included a severe outbreak of the bubonic plague in London. Epidemics have always haunted humans, but rarely do we get such a detailed glimpse into one person’s life during a crisis from so long ago.</p>

In 1796, he carried out his now famous experiment on eight-year-old James Phipps. Jenner inserted pus taken from a cowpox pustule and inserted it into an incision on the boy's arm. He was testing his theory, drawn from the folklore of the countryside, that milkmaids who suffered the mild disease of cowpox never contracted smallpox, one of the greatest killers of the period, particularly among children. Jenner subsequently proved that having been inoculated with cowpox Phipps was immune to smallpox. He submitted a paper to the Royal Society in 1797 describing his experiment, but was told that his ideas were...

Click above for a video excerpt from The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius describing a personal encounter with the dreaded Plague of Justinian. The thought of pandemic troubles many souls these days. It is well to keep in mind that as bad as things may seem with regard to the deaths caused by the COVID-19 virus, we are not even within shouting distance of the type of utter and absolute societal devastation caused by the typical catastrophic historical plague. One of these epic pestilential events was the so-called Plague of Justinian of the mid-to-late 6th century AD. Erupting in AD 542,...

Marcus Aurelius. Photo: © DEA Picture Library/Art Resource, NY. The year was 166 C.E., and the Roman Empire was at the zenith of its power. The triumphant Roman legions, under the command of Emperor Lucius Verrus, returned to Rome victorious after having defeated their Parthian enemies on the eastern border of the Roman Empire. As they marched west toward Rome, they carried with them more than the spoils of plundered Parthian temples; they also carried an epidemic that would ravage the Roman Empire over the course of the next two decades, an event that would inexorably alter the landscape of...

The Plague of Cyprian, named after the man who by AD 248 found himself Bishop of Carthage, struck in a period of history when basic facts are sometimes known barely or not at all. Yet the one fact that virtually all of our sources do agree upon is that a great pestilence defined the age between AD 249 and AD 262. Inscriptions, papyri, archaeological remains, and textual sources collectively insist on the high stakes of the pandemic. In a recent study, I was able to count at least seven eyewitnesses, and a further six independent lines of transmission, whose testimony...

Liberal Journalist Rushes to Hail Chelsea Clinton for Her 'Unshakeable Obsession with Diarrhea' By Tim Graham Created 08/24/2013 - 11:39pm Joe Conason is still trying to be the number one journalistic ring-kisser to the Clinton family. His latest effort is fawning all over Chelsea Clinton, the humanitarian (and occasional NBC News correspondent.) He complained on her behalf that “the political press still seems far more inclined to ruminate over her supposed ambitions rather than report her real concerns.” Chelsea is Nobel Prize material, Conason wants you to know, with global concerns that include, “among other things, an unshakeable obsession with...

As those who follow the gyrations of the stock market are well aware, human beings have a propensity for short-term thinking. They react on impulse to that which is recent; they magnify its significance; and they forget what previous generations learned through bitter experience.To this propensity, the study of history can be an antidote. But all too often historians ransack the past in support of current prejudice.For one who wishes to escape the prison of presentmindedness and gain perspective, there is no substitute for works written regarding circumstances similar to our own at a time our prejudices and predilections...

In his bid to win the position of Director-General for the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was playing a nice technocrat. At every venue and opportunity, he presents himself as a humble, smiley and caring and humanitarian who loses sleep over the state of world health. But his 12-page campaign CV never mentions his most important experience that made it possible for him to climb the ladder of power within the tyrannical regime oppressing and misruling Ethiopia. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as well as being the first WHO director without a medical degree, also has a somewhat political...

When it came to deadly epidemics, the Soviets didn’t do half-measures. Not only doctors, but the police, army, navy, and even the KGB were all brought in to curb the spread.In 1939, microbiologist Abram Berlin brought a dangerous disease back with him to Moscow from Saratov. There in Saratov, during experiments on animals, he used the living causative agent of the plague, and was strictly confined to quarantine. However, an urgent call from Moscow forced him to go immediately to the capital, unleashing the plague. Berlin checked in at the Hotel National, dined there, and visited a hairdresser. Feeling very...

A 101-year-old Italian man born during the Spanish flu pandemic has reportedly survived a coronavirus infection as the outbreak continues to ravage his country and spread globally. Gloria Lisi, the vice mayor of Rimini, a city on the coast of the Adriatic Sea in the Italian north, said the man had been released from a hospital earlier this week and returned to his family. She identified him only as Mr. P. "He made it. Mr. P. made it," said Lisi, according to the ANSA news agency. Lisi said the man was admitted to a hospital in Rimini last week and...

This was the worst outbreak of plague in England since the black death of 1348. London lost roughly 15% of its population. While 68,596 deaths were recorded in the city, the true number was probably over 100,000. Other parts of the country also suffered. The earliest cases of disease occurred in the spring of 1665 in a parish outside the city walls called St Giles-in-the-Fields. The death rate began to rise during the hot summer months and peaked in September when 7,165 Londoners died in one week. Rats carried the fleas that caused the plague. They were attracted by city...

The world’s oldest man, who turns 112 on Sunday, has been forced to cancel his birthday celebrations because of coronavirus. Bob Weighton, from Hampshire in the UK, was due to celebrate with family and friends, but with the UK locked down he will spend his birthday alone. “Everything is cancelled, no visitors, no celebration,” he told Sky News. “It’s a dead loss as far as celebration is concerned.” Weighton lived through the last truly global pandemic, the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, but says he does not remember it.

From a disease standpoint, Shakespeare was living in arguably the worst place and time in history. Shakespeare's overcrowded, rat-infested, sexually promiscuous London, with raw sewage flowing in the Thames, was the hub for the nastiest diseases known to mankind. Here are the worst of the worst. 1. Plague It is little surprise that the plague was the most dreaded disease of Shakespeare's time. Carried by fleas living on the fur of rats, the plague swept through London in 1563, 1578-9, 1582, 1592-3, and 1603 (Singman, 52). The outbreaks in 1563 and 1603 were the most ferocious, each wiping out over...

Gene sequencing, from which scientists can gather hereditary data of organisms, has revealed that the Black Death, often referred to as The Plague, which reduced the world’s total population by about 100 million, originated from China over 2000 years ago, scientists from several countries wrote in the medical journal Nature Genetics. Genome sequencing has allowed the researchers to reconstruct plague pandemics from the Black Death to the late 1800s.Black Death and The Plague – the plague is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. The Black Death is one huge plague event (pandemic) in history. The Black...

American media woke up Wednesday to shocking news: the Chinese government announced it would expel three Wall Street Journal journalists based in Beijing: deputy bureau chief Josh Chin and reporter Chao Deng, both U.S. citizens, and reporter Philip Wen, an Australian citizen. The last time China expelled so many foreign journalists from a single Western media organization, Mao Zedong was dictator. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said the expulsion was retaliation for a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The Real Sick Man of Asia” by Walter Russell Mead. In it, Mead discussed how the Chinese government’s initial response to the coronavirus outbreak...

Measles has killed nearly three times as many people as Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, figures show. Around 6,000 patients have died from measles since the start of 2019, with cases reported in every corner of the African country. More than a quarter of a million people have been infected in that time, with the World Health Organisation describing it as the 'world's worst outbreak'. Despite the growing death-toll, the DRC's simultaneous Ebola outbreak has gained far more international attention. The outbreak of the virus has killed at least 2,231 people since the first case was reported in...

The specifics of how the person contracted the plague have not been revealed Three other people 250 miles (400km) away have been diagnosed this month Two have the bubonic plague while two have the more lethal pneumonic strain One man was treated for the bubonic plague after he ate a wild rabbit, while the first two patients were diagnosed with the more fatal and contagious pneumonic strain.

Blue lips. Blackened skin. Blood leaking from noses and mouths. Coughing fits so intense they ripped muscles. Crippling headaches and body pains that felt like torture. These were the symptoms of a disease that was first recorded in Haskell County, Kansas, one hundred years ago this week, in January 1918. From Kansas the illness spread quickly: not only throughout the U.S. but across the world. Eventually (if misleadingly) it became known as Spanish flu. And while its effects on the body were awful, the mortality rate was truly terrifying. During a pandemic that lasted two years from its outbreak in...

New research using ancient DNA has revealed that plague has been endemic in human populations for more than twice as long as previously thought, and that the ancestral plague would have been predominantly spread by human-to-human contact -- until genetic mutations allowed Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis), the bacteria that causes plague, to survive in the gut of fleas. These mutations, which may have occurred near the turn of the 1st millennium BC, gave rise to the bubonic form of plague that spreads at terrifying speed through flea -- and consequently rat -- carriers. The bubonic plague caused the pandemics that...