Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Can't just gives in join my staff writer Jake Graph either can't. Every now and then, just as a treat for you really special listeners out there, we like to discuss something really grizzly and maccab and in the past it's spent towards your devices or or really bloody wars. And today we have another trait for everyone, the Black Death. It's true and I like this one a lot better than the other very grizzly ones we've talked about before. I don't know why, but it's it's a really interesting topic to me. I guess it's just that the shear, the sheer like effect of the Black Death and how many people did kill because if you look at the stats, like the one and most often quoted is that you're lost a third of its population in the Black Death and this was only in like the short period that's referred to as a Black Death, and the actual play actually you know, lived on after that. So the Black Death we're talking thirty seven to thirteen fifty one, and there are geneticists today who are studying the effects of the Black the Black Death, and they say that England's population especially one of the reasons there's so little genetic diversity there is because of the Black Death, and other parts of Europe were still trying to catch up, and it took a long time to recover from the effects of losing twenty five million people. That's, like you said, a third of the population of Europe. We're talking about all the way from the Mediterranean countries to the Scandinavian ones, even to parts of Russia and even parts of Africa where trade routes were established. That's right, and that leads us to going back to the beginning of how the Black Death began. And they believed today that it started in Asia. The first case came from the Mongol territory, and they can trace that the cases came up through the trade route. So obviously people going back and forth, we're carrying this disease and spreading it um and eventually made its way to Europe. And it's pretty interesting story the way it got there because there was this trading post called Kafa and what is now Ukraine at least where the Genoese were using it and they actually got attacked by the Tartars. So when the Tars attacked, they actually contracted the disease UM in the process because the Genoese were were inflicted with it, and so the Tars started dying. And at first the Genoese were like, yeah, this is God, you know, saying, you know, we won and we're on God's side. But then they started realizing that that the disease was spreading towards them, and the Tars actually launched. I love this. They had upholded. Um, a rotting body was running from the plague into the town of Genoees, so that it spread the disease towards them and more. Yeah, and the Tarters thought that certainly the malhuterous smell emanating from the rotting corpses would be enough to drive them out. Well, for one, yeah, it did, but for two also, it disseminated this awful, awful disease. So the Genuee get back to Italy essentially, and we can trace how the Black Death went on its major trade routes around Europe. We know that um, some of the the bigger paths were from Italy and then to Austria and Germany and then from France to England and Ireland, and then eventually by forty nine and fifty we see that it reaches parts of Russia and then even parts of Africa along these routes. So, Black Death, why is it so bad? While we will tell you. Um, you would get these purple splotches on your body, and they referred to them as God's tokens, because once your body became infected with these little purple splotches or black spots, it was a sign from God that your time was almost up. And if there were a blessing behind the Black Death, it was that it killed quickly. It didn't kill softly. It killed quickly, that's true, and people wouldn't They would also get these tumors. They were basically the size of eggs or or even apples next, yeah, they were. Sometimes they were so big that your head would get pushed to the side and you couldn't even cock it upright again because it would just be completely turned over from this giant, giant node of of pus and grossness. And there were different variations on the Black Death. Some people would get on like a bubonic form of the plague, and they would be taken with trembling and chills and fever, and then some who got the pneumonic form be coughing up blood and your body would just be rotting from the inside out until you would have really foul breath and your body it would just just nastiness with seep from your pores, and you just didn't want to be around anybody at all. So you would see pestlen's houses where people would go to die, or your neighbor's helps would be covered with a black ex over the door to show that there were people inside who'd been afflicted with the black Death. Husbands would leave their wives, babies would be abandoned. Sometimes entire villages would just be shut down. That's right. And UM, this was partially a problem because they didn't quite know how it was spread. And even to this day it kind of eludes a lot of historians and people studying this and how fast it did spread, because it did spread so fast that it doesn't really make sense. Um, because people didn't travel as much as they do today. And Uh, anyway, to get back to what caused it, people weren't sure. And UM, a lot of people attributed it immediately to God's wrath, like God wants to inflict this on us for something we did. And one group that came out of this idea are called the Flagelence. And this UH is a group of people who at the time, I believe the plague was certainly a consequence of their sins, and they would start um basically inflicting UM suffering and and UH scourges on themselves so that they could make up for their sins. And this comes from the idea of redemptive suffering, which you know still holds a place in Catholic teaching. But the Flagelence took it way you know, they out to left field. These Flagelens were seen as sort of way too out there, and I believe the Vatican basically said, like, you know, keep it down, and they eventually disappeared almost overnight. But there are lots of other theories about what caused it in the first place. UM. As far as Santita sation goes, during the fourteenth century, well, there was none. It was awful. People would throw their food scraps into the street. There would be you know, excrement from animals and from humans, and it was just everywhere. And we know that um waste like that attracts vermin, and rats were a really big carrier of fleas. So scientists today have a theory about these these fleas and the rodents that carried them, and the idea was that um a flea would bite of rodent that had this bad bacteria and it's blood, the bacterium that ultimately led to the black death, and because it would infect the flee somehow we get stuck in the four gut, which was the the upper part of the flee stomach and essentially the flee almost the way I think if it is like the lap band system, if you guys have seen commercials for that, you know how it cuts off part of your stomach so you're not hungry, but had the opposite effect that the top part would get full, but the bottom part would still be wide open for more food. So the flea would go searching for more food and feast upon more and more rats, and it just could never get enough. So eventually the rats are being infected by these bad fleas with bad blood and they would all die, and then the fleas needed more fodder. They would start latching onto humans. And because that the rats and the fleaves were said plentiful the Black Death could spread up to two and a half miles that's four kilometers for all of you out there per day, So it was incredibly fast, incredibly swift, and you died really fast from it too, that's right. And um, this theory about the fleet to rat thing, it kind of might explain why people blame Jews at the time, and there were lots of there. There was a general feeling of anti Semitism at the time, obviously, but people actually believe that the Jews were intentionally tainting the water supply with the plague. And um, this is of course not true, but people believe it, and today people think and perhaps what actually happened, supposedly Jews actually died and fewer numbers in the Christians may not be true, but at least it seemed that way at the time, and it makes sense because the Jews and Christians had such desperate etiologies. They typically didn't live together exactly. They were isolated. Yeah, they were, and it kind of worked in the Jew's favor at first, at least because they had their own quarantine. That's right. And not only that, but there are theories that the Jewish people had actually um more advanced ideas of hygiene at the time, and so this helped them. And also I remember hearing the theory when when I was in school that Jews actually were more likely to keep cats, and cats would scare away or kill the rats that were likely to carry the fleas. Yeah, so that was one theory. So anyway to get back to any Semitism that was going on at the time, Uh, Jews weren't immune. Obviously many died of the plague, but many were blaming them. So they the Christians who did blame them, uh, would go on these riots and they would even take whole buildings full of Jewish people and burn them to the ground, or they would take individual Jews and burn them at the steak or they would even put them like stuff them into wine caskets and throw them into the river. And as if we're shadowing the future, one of the countries that persecuted the Jews the most was Germany actually, and we know that, uh, most of the Jews who died during the period of the Black Death, it wasn't due to contracting the disease, but being put to death escapegoats for the plague. Now, if you didn't buy into the idea of fleas and rodents, as many people at the time didn't because mysticism and uh superstition was much more advanced than medicine, they just didn't have that kind of knowledge. Back during the Middle Ages, there was another idea floating around, and this is sort of, you know, sort of crazy, so you guys are gonna have to bear with me. But the thought was that on March Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars were all in aquarious. Now I'm not really familiar with astrology, so I'm not sure where this can know is, but apparently they were all working together, they were all inline and conditions were right before a big reaction to occur. And Jupiter is known as a hot and wet planet and Mars is known as a dry planet. So putter I was able to absorb these evil vapors from the Earth, but Mars sort of um uh re reassimilated them back down to the Earth's atmosphere and specifically over Europe, I guess and spreading what they called a death fog. And people had a lot of different ideas about how to keep out of the way of this death fog, one of which was avoidance, which was pretty smart especially didn't have any preventive medicine, but the others where you didn't eat meat, you didn't eat figs, you didn't exercise, and you didn't have sucks, all great ways to avoid the black death. But also they also said you shouldn't bathe, which I don't know if that helps. Such a good idea. And they called this fog of death miasthma. I believe it was pronounced um. According to a book by Joseph Patrick byrne Uh. They believe that when you were infected with a small amount of this miasma, the body could actually combat it by moving it away to the heart and and other organs that could get rid of or way away from the heart, I should say two organs that could get rid of it. So this ended up being places where like the ears and the armpits and the liver, and these were actually places where bubos would would show up, these marks on your body. And so they believe these these bubos were actually good um, and that when they opened it actually lets out the bad um tainted whatever it is, pus or whatever, and so you would recover after that. But so there was this whole theory of going around about my asthma, even even the Pope subscribed to it. Um he didn't. He was actually an interesting defender of the Jews at this time. He he loved Jews for some reason, and he subscribed to the theory of my asthma and not the idea that Jews poisoned the wells. And so he would actually sit between things of fire. And this was one thing that could actually protect you from the my asthma was burning wood, Yeah, exactly, aromatic woods, things like rose mary in time, and he sort of herb that was very fragrant, and um name was mentioned, this idea of letting out the bad stuff from inside these big sores. And that's why there were some very primitive attempts at Lansing then and blood letting, very primitive. Like I said, medicine, but medicine nonetheless. And that's something that's really interesting. Because after the Black Death phased out, and it did, it eventually phased out and ran its court. Uh, a lot of things happened. And one of the biggest changes was an advancement in education because people saw that before it was really inadequate. What they had superstition was no way to treat a big epidemic like this, they needed serious learning and serious medicines, so was on increase in education. But there were also big changes in the religious and economic sectors of society. For one, Europe in the Middle Ages had been a big sort of feudal system where you know, the service work for the lords and they all shared this land and they all lived in the country and everything was you know, pretty happy, You're lucky for the most part, but so many people had died that there were no more people to really work the land, so the cost of labor had skyrocketed. But there was enough food to go around still and not enough people to eat it, so the cost of food remain the same. So eventually people started moving to where the city in the urban areas really grew up in the feudal system sort of dissipated. And what else was interesting about the religious sectors of society was that if you were still a devout person after you had seen this epidemic come in and wipe out all of your family, then you worshiped in a very small and private chapel. Because on the whole people started engaging and all sorts of debauchery. They would wear, you know, very elaborate clothes, they would eat very expensive foods, they would party, they would drink because the predominant thought was that God had turned his back on society and and people couldn't trust him anymore, so why be devout? That's right. So the Catholic Church a lot of lost a lot of power in that way over over people's personal lives. And um, even like you said, they like they go on on these like debaucherous like parties and things. It also sort of played into the idea of the dons macabre, which was a dance with death kind of and it was kind of a memento more sort of line or that death is is around the corner. And people say that the people at this time, when they're at least immediately after the Black Death, were very preoccupied with the idea, with the idea of death. And it's very understandable. Um, when you think about it, you think of so many people that you would know, so many people in your family who have died at this time, and you would obviously feel all the time like death might be coming for you any moment. And so that the Don's macab could be manifested in several different ways. It was an art form, but underneath that broad umbrella we had a visual arts, theater and music and different ways to express the relationships between the living and the dad and how the living could interact with the dad and so um. Like you said, Candasa did run its course, but it actually it's stuck around in certain places for the next like a few hundred years. There was always at least one town in Europe that was suffering from it at one time for for this period. It phased out a little bit after that, and then by the eighteen hundreds the end actually came back in areas of East Asia. And it was by this time that people were studying it a little bit more closely and knowing a little bit about how bacteria works, and they discovered um, a particular by bacteria that they that they attributed to it UM. And they tried and they felt that they had finally figured out the key to what caused the Black Death in the first place. But there's still a lot of actually controversy to this day about what actually calls it, because a lot of things just don't make sense with the with what accounts were written in the fourteenth century about the Black Death, right, reconciling people's accounts of what they observed and their fellow man versus what the science has discovered about the bacterium today. Right. And it's also tough because the people back then, we can't always trust exactly those accounts because they don't have the same knowledge. They don't have the same terminology as we do in describing medical conditions. So how much can we trust their accounts? You don't know exactly, So that we're working with what we have, and historians and geneticists and epidemiologists, I think they're still researching it. There's still a lot to find out and in nantrim. If you want to know more about epidemics and contagious diseases and historical epidemics, you can find out much more at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think, send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. M

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Can't just gives in join my staff writer Jake Graph either can't. Every now and then, just as a treat for you really special listeners out there, we like to discuss something really grizzly and maccab and in the past it's spent towards your devices or or really bloody wars. And today we have another trait for everyone, the Black Death. It's true and I like this one a lot better than the other very grizzly ones we've talked about before. I don't know why, but it's it's a really interesting topic to me. I guess it's just that the shear, the sheer like effect of the Black Death and how many people did kill because if you look at the stats, like the one and most often quoted is that you're lost a third of its population in the Black Death and this was only in like the short period that's referred to as a Black Death, and the actual play actually you know, lived on after that. So the Black Death we're talking thirty seven to thirteen fifty one, and there are geneticists today who are studying the effects of the Black the Black Death, and they say that England's population especially one of the reasons there's so little genetic diversity there is because of the Black Death, and other parts of Europe were still trying to catch up, and it took a long time to recover from the effects of losing twenty five million people. That's, like you said, a third of the population of Europe. We're talking about all the way from the Mediterranean countries to the Scandinavian ones, even to parts of Russia and even parts of Africa where trade routes were established. That's right, and that leads us to going back to the beginning of how the Black Death began. And they believed today that it started in Asia. The first case came from the Mongol territory, and they can trace that the cases came up through the trade route. So obviously people going back and forth, we're carrying this disease and spreading it um and eventually made its way to Europe. And it's pretty interesting story the way it got there because there was this trading post called Kafa and what is now Ukraine at least where the Genoese were using it and they actually got attacked by the Tartars. So when the Tars attacked, they actually contracted the disease UM in the process because the Genoese were were inflicted with it, and so the Tars started dying. And at first the Genoese were like, yeah, this is God, you know, saying, you know, we won and we're on God's side. But then they started realizing that that the disease was spreading towards them, and the Tars actually launched. I love this. They had upholded. Um, a rotting body was running from the plague into the town of Genoees, so that it spread the disease towards them and more. Yeah, and the Tarters thought that certainly the malhuterous smell emanating from the rotting corpses would be enough to drive them out. Well, for one, yeah, it did, but for two also, it disseminated this awful, awful disease. So the Genuee get back to Italy essentially, and we can trace how the Black Death went on its major trade routes around Europe. We know that um, some of the the bigger paths were from Italy and then to Austria and Germany and then from France to England and Ireland, and then eventually by forty nine and fifty we see that it reaches parts of Russia and then even parts of Africa along these routes. So, Black Death, why is it so bad? While we will tell you. Um, you would get these purple splotches on your body, and they referred to them as God's tokens, because once your body became infected with these little purple splotches or black spots, it was a sign from God that your time was almost up. And if there were a blessing behind the Black Death, it was that it killed quickly. It didn't kill softly. It killed quickly, that's true, and people wouldn't They would also get these tumors. They were basically the size of eggs or or even apples next, yeah, they were. Sometimes they were so big that your head would get pushed to the side and you couldn't even cock it upright again because it would just be completely turned over from this giant, giant node of of pus and grossness. And there were different variations on the Black Death. Some people would get on like a bubonic form of the plague, and they would be taken with trembling and chills and fever, and then some who got the pneumonic form be coughing up blood and your body would just be rotting from the inside out until you would have really foul breath and your body it would just just nastiness with seep from your pores, and you just didn't want to be around anybody at all. So you would see pestlen's houses where people would go to die, or your neighbor's helps would be covered with a black ex over the door to show that there were people inside who'd been afflicted with the black Death. Husbands would leave their wives, babies would be abandoned. Sometimes entire villages would just be shut down. That's right. And UM, this was partially a problem because they didn't quite know how it was spread. And even to this day it kind of eludes a lot of historians and people studying this and how fast it did spread, because it did spread so fast that it doesn't really make sense. Um, because people didn't travel as much as they do today. And Uh, anyway, to get back to what caused it, people weren't sure. And UM, a lot of people attributed it immediately to God's wrath, like God wants to inflict this on us for something we did. And one group that came out of this idea are called the Flagelence. And this UH is a group of people who at the time, I believe the plague was certainly a consequence of their sins, and they would start um basically inflicting UM suffering and and UH scourges on themselves so that they could make up for their sins. And this comes from the idea of redemptive suffering, which you know still holds a place in Catholic teaching. But the Flagelence took it way you know, they out to left field. These Flagelens were seen as sort of way too out there, and I believe the Vatican basically said, like, you know, keep it down, and they eventually disappeared almost overnight. But there are lots of other theories about what caused it in the first place. UM. As far as Santita sation goes, during the fourteenth century, well, there was none. It was awful. People would throw their food scraps into the street. There would be you know, excrement from animals and from humans, and it was just everywhere. And we know that um waste like that attracts vermin, and rats were a really big carrier of fleas. So scientists today have a theory about these these fleas and the rodents that carried them, and the idea was that um a flea would bite of rodent that had this bad bacteria and it's blood, the bacterium that ultimately led to the black death, and because it would infect the flee somehow we get stuck in the four gut, which was the the upper part of the flee stomach and essentially the flee almost the way I think if it is like the lap band system, if you guys have seen commercials for that, you know how it cuts off part of your stomach so you're not hungry, but had the opposite effect that the top part would get full, but the bottom part would still be wide open for more food. So the flea would go searching for more food and feast upon more and more rats, and it just could never get enough. So eventually the rats are being infected by these bad fleas with bad blood and they would all die, and then the fleas needed more fodder. They would start latching onto humans. And because that the rats and the fleaves were said plentiful the Black Death could spread up to two and a half miles that's four kilometers for all of you out there per day, So it was incredibly fast, incredibly swift, and you died really fast from it too, that's right. And um, this theory about the fleet to rat thing, it kind of might explain why people blame Jews at the time, and there were lots of there. There was a general feeling of anti Semitism at the time, obviously, but people actually believe that the Jews were intentionally tainting the water supply with the plague. And um, this is of course not true, but people believe it, and today people think and perhaps what actually happened, supposedly Jews actually died and fewer numbers in the Christians may not be true, but at least it seemed that way at the time, and it makes sense because the Jews and Christians had such desperate etiologies. They typically didn't live together exactly. They were isolated. Yeah, they were, and it kind of worked in the Jew's favor at first, at least because they had their own quarantine. That's right. And not only that, but there are theories that the Jewish people had actually um more advanced ideas of hygiene at the time, and so this helped them. And also I remember hearing the theory when when I was in school that Jews actually were more likely to keep cats, and cats would scare away or kill the rats that were likely to carry the fleas. Yeah, so that was one theory. So anyway to get back to any Semitism that was going on at the time, Uh, Jews weren't immune. Obviously many died of the plague, but many were blaming them. So they the Christians who did blame them, uh, would go on these riots and they would even take whole buildings full of Jewish people and burn them to the ground, or they would take individual Jews and burn them at the steak or they would even put them like stuff them into wine caskets and throw them into the river. And as if we're shadowing the future, one of the countries that persecuted the Jews the most was Germany actually, and we know that, uh, most of the Jews who died during the period of the Black Death, it wasn't due to contracting the disease, but being put to death escapegoats for the plague. Now, if you didn't buy into the idea of fleas and rodents, as many people at the time didn't because mysticism and uh superstition was much more advanced than medicine, they just didn't have that kind of knowledge. Back during the Middle Ages, there was another idea floating around, and this is sort of, you know, sort of crazy, so you guys are gonna have to bear with me. But the thought was that on March Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars were all in aquarious. Now I'm not really familiar with astrology, so I'm not sure where this can know is, but apparently they were all working together, they were all inline and conditions were right before a big reaction to occur. And Jupiter is known as a hot and wet planet and Mars is known as a dry planet. So putter I was able to absorb these evil vapors from the Earth, but Mars sort of um uh re reassimilated them back down to the Earth's atmosphere and specifically over Europe, I guess and spreading what they called a death fog. And people had a lot of different ideas about how to keep out of the way of this death fog, one of which was avoidance, which was pretty smart especially didn't have any preventive medicine, but the others where you didn't eat meat, you didn't eat figs, you didn't exercise, and you didn't have sucks, all great ways to avoid the black death. But also they also said you shouldn't bathe, which I don't know if that helps. Such a good idea. And they called this fog of death miasthma. I believe it was pronounced um. According to a book by Joseph Patrick byrne Uh. They believe that when you were infected with a small amount of this miasma, the body could actually combat it by moving it away to the heart and and other organs that could get rid of or way away from the heart, I should say two organs that could get rid of it. So this ended up being places where like the ears and the armpits and the liver, and these were actually places where bubos would would show up, these marks on your body. And so they believe these these bubos were actually good um, and that when they opened it actually lets out the bad um tainted whatever it is, pus or whatever, and so you would recover after that. But so there was this whole theory of going around about my asthma, even even the Pope subscribed to it. Um he didn't. He was actually an interesting defender of the Jews at this time. He he loved Jews for some reason, and he subscribed to the theory of my asthma and not the idea that Jews poisoned the wells. And so he would actually sit between things of fire. And this was one thing that could actually protect you from the my asthma was burning wood, Yeah, exactly, aromatic woods, things like rose mary in time, and he sort of herb that was very fragrant, and um name was mentioned, this idea of letting out the bad stuff from inside these big sores. And that's why there were some very primitive attempts at Lansing then and blood letting, very primitive. Like I said, medicine, but medicine nonetheless. And that's something that's really interesting. Because after the Black Death phased out, and it did, it eventually phased out and ran its court. Uh, a lot of things happened. And one of the biggest changes was an advancement in education because people saw that before it was really inadequate. What they had superstition was no way to treat a big epidemic like this, they needed serious learning and serious medicines, so was on increase in education. But there were also big changes in the religious and economic sectors of society. For one, Europe in the Middle Ages had been a big sort of feudal system where you know, the service work for the lords and they all shared this land and they all lived in the country and everything was you know, pretty happy, You're lucky for the most part, but so many people had died that there were no more people to really work the land, so the cost of labor had skyrocketed. But there was enough food to go around still and not enough people to eat it, so the cost of food remain the same. So eventually people started moving to where the city in the urban areas really grew up in the feudal system sort of dissipated. And what else was interesting about the religious sectors of society was that if you were still a devout person after you had seen this epidemic come in and wipe out all of your family, then you worshiped in a very small and private chapel. Because on the whole people started engaging and all sorts of debauchery. They would wear, you know, very elaborate clothes, they would eat very expensive foods, they would party, they would drink because the predominant thought was that God had turned his back on society and and people couldn't trust him anymore, so why be devout? That's right. So the Catholic Church a lot of lost a lot of power in that way over over people's personal lives. And um, even like you said, they like they go on on these like debaucherous like parties and things. It also sort of played into the idea of the dons macabre, which was a dance with death kind of and it was kind of a memento more sort of line or that death is is around the corner. And people say that the people at this time, when they're at least immediately after the Black Death, were very preoccupied with the idea, with the idea of death. And it's very understandable. Um, when you think about it, you think of so many people that you would know, so many people in your family who have died at this time, and you would obviously feel all the time like death might be coming for you any moment. And so that the Don's macab could be manifested in several different ways. It was an art form, but underneath that broad umbrella we had a visual arts, theater and music and different ways to express the relationships between the living and the dad and how the living could interact with the dad and so um. Like you said, Candasa did run its course, but it actually it's stuck around in certain places for the next like a few hundred years. There was always at least one town in Europe that was suffering from it at one time for for this period. It phased out a little bit after that, and then by the eighteen hundreds the end actually came back in areas of East Asia. And it was by this time that people were studying it a little bit more closely and knowing a little bit about how bacteria works, and they discovered um, a particular by bacteria that they that they attributed to it UM. And they tried and they felt that they had finally figured out the key to what caused the Black Death in the first place. But there's still a lot of actually controversy to this day about what actually calls it, because a lot of things just don't make sense with the with what accounts were written in the fourteenth century about the Black Death, right, reconciling people's accounts of what they observed and their fellow man versus what the science has discovered about the bacterium today. Right. And it's also tough because the people back then, we can't always trust exactly those accounts because they don't have the same knowledge. They don't have the same terminology as we do in describing medical conditions. So how much can we trust their accounts? You don't know exactly, So that we're working with what we have, and historians and geneticists and epidemiologists, I think they're still researching it. There's still a lot to find out and in nantrim. If you want to know more about epidemics and contagious diseases and historical epidemics, you can find out much more at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think, send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. M