Ο coronavirus, although we have already found the vaccine that promises to fight it, it has not come to an end. But the story of pandemics can teach us a lot about people's reflexes to the calamity of death and how far medical science and technology has exploded over the centuries.
Plague of Justinian
The first recorded pandemic of the post-Christian era (541 AD) broke out in Istanbul, then capital of Byzantine Empire. Its centre was an area of Egypt, controlled by the army of the Justinian. According to the relevant sources, the enterobacterium Yersinia pestis was transmitted by insects that stung rats and then aerially on soldiers.
When the army returned to Constantinople, the first deaths occurred immediately. At least 5,000 people a day were dying in the city alone, and the pandemic spread to the western countries, but also to the Arab countries, Asia and North Africa.
It is estimated that killed between 30 and 50 million people and never left. Thomas Mockaitis, professor of history at DePaul University described this terrible condition: «People could not understand what was happening to them, they did not know how to avoid the disease. When the disease passed, the best guess we can make is that those who somehow survived became immune.» The plague did not leave the human world. Its second wave came 800 years later.
The Black Death
The earliest information about the return of the plague to the developing world in the 14th century refers to Genoese ships crossing the Black Sea from the port of Kafka to the port of Messina in Sicily. When the ships dropped anchor, their holds were already hundreds of dead.
The plague virus, at a time of conviction, superstition and inadequate hygiene measures, spread like wildfire throughout Italy, but also in France, England and the Netherlands. As the months passed and each country counted millions of dead, the concept of quarantine was defined for the first time at that time.
Venetian doctors instructed the people working in the port of Ragusa not to come into contact with sailors anchoring their ships there. The sailors were then ordered to stay in their ships for 30 days (trentino), which was then increased to 40 days (quarrantino). The plague came - temporarily - full circle in 1353, with an estimated loss of life of 200 million people worldwide. But the horror was not over.
The London Plague
The plague continued to appear, having as centred on London. From 1348 to 1665 it appeared 40 times (!), causing the death of 20% of the total population of the city each time.
In the early 1500s, England first enforced laws that resembled attempts to track patients. Houses that had patients inside were required to have a straw ball nailed in their yard. If a person had several members of his family infected, when he went out, he had to carry a white stick.
Cats and dogs were implicated as the main carriers of the disease, resulting in a mass slaughter of thousands of animals. The Black Plague wrote its final chapter in London in 1665, with 100,000 dead in seven months. The quarantine included mandatory stays in hermetically sealed houses for everyone. The doors of the houses had red crosses painted on them, along with the message «My God, have mercy on us».
Smallpox
One could say that the European explorers who first set foot in the pristine lands of Central and North America (16th century), «masticated» them all at once, as they came from countries where smallpox was already endemic.
When the indigenous people of Mexico and the USA came into contact with the European potential carriers of smallpox, what followed was like a real massacre. The indigenous populations of Mexico are thought to have gone from 11 million to 11 million in the space of a century, were reduced to 1,000,000 and the total population of America was reduced by 90%.
The smallpox vaccine was discovered in the late 18th century, by the British doctor Edward Jenner and it wasn't until 1980 that the World Health Organization officially announced the complete elimination of smallpox worldwide.
Cholera
Not one, not two, but five cholera pandemics broke out in the 19th century. Cholera began its ominous journey in India (1817-1824), appeared in North America and Europe (1826-1837), made a lasting stop in North Africa (1846, with fluctuations in intensity until 1880) and returned again to Europe (1863-1875), with Naples and cities in Spain as its main outbreaks, before leaving again for India (1881-1896).
In the late 19th century, European doctors suspected that the cholera germ could be transmitted in public places through water or even saliva, even ordering the closure of many public aqueducts. The microbiologist Louis Pasteur together with Fillipo Pacini and Robert Koch achieved humanity's first victory against the bacterium Vibrio Cholerae by developing the vaccine. It is worth pointing out that cholera returned with two more smaller-scale pandemics (1899-1923, 1961-1975) in the 20th century.
By Yannis Dimitrellou
