Free Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria by Anne Maczulak

Justinian’s rule, bubonic plagues mysteriously disappeared for the next 700 years. As the last remnants of Roman influence faded, disease control also declined, and many contradictions took root. People believed that retaining wastes and even an animal carcass in the home repelled evil and thus disease, yet many also assumed that bad odors brought illness—a cadaver in the living room surely smells. Even with the building of the first centralized hospitals at the dawn of the Middle Ages, medicine remained the domain of healers who used leeches for extracting the body’s pains. Faulty birthing methods caused a high incidence of mental illness that further threatened good personal hygiene.
    Beginning in the 14th century, four plague epidemics would decimate Europe, none more brutal than the Black Death, named for the
    black-purplish lesions formed by hemorrhaged vessels under the skin.
    Between 1346 and 1352 the Black Death killed more than 25 million
    people in Europe or about 30 percent of the total population. Combined with the loss of life as the plague followed trade routes from Asia in the 13th century and to northern Africa and the Crimea before reaching Europe, the global Black Death killed a total of 200 million.
     

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    allies and enemies
    As in Justinian’s day, survivors could not bury the dead fast enough.
    Survivors carried the corpses on long poles—“I wouldn’t touch that
    with a 10-foot pole”—to mass graves outside the towns. The epidemic
    slowed only when it reached the Alps where colder weather repelled
    rats, and the pathogen had likely mutated to a less virulent form.
    Figure 2.2 Dance of Death. Death became an everyday occurrence, by the hundreds in some towns, in the Middle Ages in Europe. Artists, writers, and composers depicted bleak futures where Death overwhelms the living.
    An epidemic that destroys 100 million lives in less than a decade
    and reduces Europe’s population by one-third, as the Black Death did, certainly impacts society in ways that are felt for generations.
    Even art and music reflected the looming presence of Death, which
    usually triumphed over mortals (see Figure 2.2). Some cities lost 75 percent of their children, and entire family trees had been reduced to one individual—the plague had created a parentless generation. Craftsmen, artists, farmers, and clergy disappeared. A plunge in economic vitality caused birth rates to drop.
    During the plagues, clergymen insisted as they had for centuries
    that sickness came as penance from God. Their ineffective efforts to
    administer to the dying by combining faith and sorcery caused the church to lose its customary privileged status in society. The banking profession gained stature, however, for two reasons. The plague’s survivors understood the need for protecting assets for the next generation, especially when death could strike so suddenly. At the same time, serfs abandoned fields controlled by feudal landowners and chapter 2 · bacteria in history
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    took advantage of monetary pay to fill labor shortages in the cities.
    This in turn helped create a mobile workforce that covered Europe in
    search of the highest wages in labor-starved towns. Young adults left
    as the sole managers of family property opted against traveling to traditional centers of learning in Paris, Vienna, or Bologna. New centers of education thus developed in Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Stockholm by the 14th century. The
    depopulation of the European continent also opened up new land for
    cultivation or development and laid the foundation for the industrial
    centers of today’s Europe.
    Surgeons had been as useless as clergymen during the plagues.
    The status of the surgeon would decline and not rebound until the
    mid-19th century when Joseph Lister invoked the need for sterile conditions in hospitals. Barbers came to the fore as more trustworthy medical practitioners despite their penchant for bloodletting as an