After construction workers digging tunnels for the new Crossrail train line in 2013 discovered some 25 skeletons buried under Charterhouse Square in the Clerkenwell area of London, scientists immediately suspected they had stumbled on a plague cemetery.
The square, once home to a monastery, is one of the few London areas that have remained undisturbed for hundreds of years, and the location outside the walls of medieval London coincided with historical accounts. To test this theory, scientists extracted DNA from one of the largest teeth in each of 12 skeletons. Testing showed evidence of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague, which confirmed that the individuals buried underneath the square had likely been exposed to—and died from—the Black Death.
The plague still infects several thousand people every year around the world, though most patients recover if treated early enough with antibiotics. When they compared the strain of plague preserved in this medieval DNA with the strain that killed some 60 people in Madagascar in 2014, however, they found something surprising. The medieval strain was no stronger than the recent one; in fact, their genetic codes matched almost exactly.
Though it had been around for ages, leprosy grew into a pandemic in Europe in the Middle Ages. A slow-developing bacterial disease that causes sores and deformities, leprosy was believed to be a punishment from God that ran in families.
The Black Death haunts the world as the worst-case scenario for the speed of disease's spread. It was the second pandemic caused by the bubonic plague, and ravaged Earth’s population. Called the Great Mortality as it caused its devastation, it became known as the Black Death in the late 17th Century.Read more: Social Distancing and Quarantine Were Used in Medieval Times to Fight the Black Death
In another devastating appearance, the bubonic plague led to the deaths of 20 percent of London’s population. The worst of the outbreak tapered off in the fall of 1666, around the same time as another destructive event—the Great Fire of London. Read more: When London Faced a Pandemic—And a Devastating Fire
The first of seven cholera pandemics over the next 150 years, this wave of the small intestine infection originated in Russia, where one million people died. Spreading through feces-infected water and food, the bacterium was passed along to British soldiers who brought it to India where millions more died. Read more: How 5 of History's Worst Pandemics Finally Ended
The first significant flu pandemic started in Siberia and Kazakhstan, traveled to Moscow, and made its way into Finland and then Poland, where it moved into the rest of Europe. By the end of 1890, 360,000 had died.Read more: The Russian Flu of 1889: The Deadly Pandemic Few Americans Took Seriously
The avian-borne flu that resulted in 50 million deaths worldwide, the 1918 flu was first observed in Europe, the United States and parts of Asia before spreading around the world. At the time, there were no effective drugs or vaccines to treat this killer flu strain. Read more: How U.S. Cities Tried to Halt the Spread of the 1918 Spanish Flu
Starting in Hong Kong and spreading throughout China and then into the United States, the Asian flu became widespread in England where, over six months, 14,000 people died. A second wave followed in early 1958, causing about 1.1 million deaths globally, with 116,000 deaths in the United States alone.Read more: How the 1957 Flu Pandemic Was Stopped Early in Its Path
First identified in 1981, AIDS destroys a person’s immune system, resulting in eventual death by diseases that the body would usually fight off. AIDS was first observed in American gay communities but is believed to have developed from a chimpanzee virus from West Africa in the 1920s. Treatments have been developed to slow the progress of the disease, but 35 million people have died of AIDS since its discoveryRead more: The History of AIDS
First identified in 2003, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is believed to have started with bats, spread to cats and then to humans in China, followed by 26 other countries, infecting 8,096 people, with 774 deaths.Read more: SARS Pandemic: How the Virus Spread Around the World in 2003
COVID-19 is caused by a novel coronavirus, the family of viruses that includes the common flu and SARS. The first reported case in China appeared in November 2019, in the Hubei Province. Without a vaccine available, the virus has spread to more than 163 countries. By March 27, 2020, nearly 24,000 people had died.Read more: 12 Times People Confronted a Crisis With Kindness
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Scientists at Public Health England in Porton Down, argue that for the Black Death to have spread so quickly and killed so many victims with such devastating speed, it would have to have been airborne. Therefore, rather than bubonic plague, which is transmitted to humans through bites from infected rat fleas (and then can be transmitted between humans, according to some research), they concluded that this must have been a pneumonic plague that made its way into the lungs of the infected and spread through coughs and sneezes.
Analysis of wills registered in the medieval City of London has shown that 60 percent of Londoners were wiped out by the Black Death from the autumn of 1348 to spring of 1349. A comparable rate of destruction would today kill some 5 million people. According to Dr. Tim Brooks from Porton Down, transmission by rat fleas as an explanation for the Black Death “simply isn’t good enough. It cannot spread fast enough from one household to the next to cause the huge number of cases that we saw during the Black Death epidemics.”
Archaeological analysis of the bones found under Charterhouse Square also revealed that the individuals buried there were mostly poor people who suffered from general ill health. Rickets, anemia and tooth decay were common, as well as childhood malnutrition, which was consistent with the “Great Famine” that struck Europe some 30 years before the plague. Many of the skeletons showed back damage, suggesting lives marked by hard physical labor.
Another interesting finding was that the remains in the square appeared to come from three different periods: not only from the original Black Death epidemic in 1348-1350, but from later outbreaks in 1361 and the 1430s. While the early burials at the site are orderly, including white shrouds around the skeletons, the ones from the 1430s show evidence of upper-body injuries, consistent with what appears to have been a time of increasing lawlessness and social chaos.
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