Pneumonic Plague Dbq Essay

During the thirteenth century, a disease known as the Black Death spread from Asia to Europe at an alarming speed. It travelled through the trade routes, in the form of infected fleas carried from town to town on rats causing catastrophic loses of population . The Black Death consisted of two forms of the disease; the pneumonic plague, and the bubonic plague . Since it was unknown as to what caused the disease at the time, their responses to the plague’s outbreak were almost entirely futile. Since religion was a big factor in nearly everybody’s lives, the records of the Black Death that we do have are heavily influenced by religion, and as such, their views strongly swayed things like treatments and medicine that were used against the plague. As

Therefore, the medicine and treatments that people received for the Black Death were more based upon prayer and miracles, for example, a fifteenth century Italian medical book suggests that plague victims should make a good death through their last rites rather than treating their body . This would have meant that victims would have accepted their fate and exposed themselves to other people, such as the priest that would come to administer their last rites, meaning that the more contagious part of the disease, the pneumonic plague, would have been passed on to more and more people. However, whilst some of the medicines had no use, others did help to prevent the spread of the disease and, while no one had any idea why, some people did survive being infected due to some of the treatments. Lancing the Black Death’s famous buboes was one such treatment . By lancing the buboes, the body was drained of infection, leading to a higher chance of survival. This treatment almost certainly stemmed from Galen’s blood-letting treatments to balance out the ‘Four Humours’ which was still being used hundreds of years after it was first