Science is Golden

by Karl Kruszelnicki

  References

  Comins, Neil F., Heavenly Errors: Misconceptions About the Real Nature of the Universe, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, pp 46, 64.

  Fernandez, Liubomir and McDonnell, Patrick J., ‘Meteorite causes a stir in Peru: The explosion near Carancas frightened and awed residents and (they say) made them sick’, Special to The Times, 21 September 2007, Los Angeles Times.

  Winckler, Gisela and Fischer, Hubertus, ‘30,000 years of cosmic dust in Antarctic ice’, Science, 28 July 2006, Vol 313, No 5786, p 491.

  Ring-a-Ring o’Roses

  We have all heard the children’s nursery rhyme that runs something like:

  Ring-a-ring o’roses,

  A pocket full of posies,

  A-tishoo! A-tishoo!

  We all fall down.

  The rhyme is usually accompanied by a little dance. The children all hold hands, form a circle, and then run or skip until they fall into the middle in a heap on top of each other.

  The standard explanation about the origin of this game is that this charming little nursery rhyme describes the symptoms and rapid demise of anyone suffering from that terrible medieval disease—the Black Death. Although it may well be a catchy tune, it has nothing to do with the plague.

  Black Death 101

  In 1347 the Bubonic Plague, commonly known as the Black Death, swept across Europe. It was caused by a bacterium living on fleas carried by rats, and it re-emerged every spring, spreading further each year. In five years, the Bubonic Plague had killed one in every three people in Europe. By 1352 the population of Europe had plummeted from 75 million to 50 million. This disaster led to labour shortages, political turmoil, and religious and philosophical questionings. (Fortunately, the regular visitations of the plague slowed down over the next few centuries.)

  The disease was devastating, killing its victims within several days, sometimes sooner. It came in a few different versions, depending on how it was transmitted, and the robustness of the victim.

  A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down (apparently from Bubonic Plague)

  Rosy rashes and sneezing weren’t really symptoms of the plague…but falling down (dead) kinda was pretty accurate.

  The Bubonic Plague was the most common form of the disease (about 90% of all cases). The victims suffered from large swellings of the lymph nodes in the groin, neck and armpits. These swellings then burst through the skin, oozing pus and blood. At this stage they were known as ‘buboes’, hence the name Bubonic Plague. The fingers would turn black from gangrene, as would the various areas on the body that bled—giving the disease its other name, the Black Death. The victims also suffered from headaches, painful joints, nausea and vomiting. About 80% of the victims died within eight days. Today, modern treatments can reduce the death rate to less than 5%.

  Eyewitness Account—1

  Marchione di Coppo Stefani, who was born in Florence, was 12 years of age when the Bubonic Plague struck. He wrote about these dreadful events in the late 1370s and early 1380s.

  He described how frightful the disease was, and how it killed not just people but all of their animals, both house pets and farm animals. As the epidemic worsened, the survivors could not bury the dead properly. Because there was neither the time nor the inclination to dig individual graves, deep trenches were dug at every church. People would sneak in at night and just toss the bodies into the trench for free, or do it by daylight and pay for the privilege. ‘The next morning, if there were many [bodies] in the trench, they covered them over with dirt. And then more bodies were put on top of them, with a little more dirt over those; they put layer on layer just like one puts layers of cheese in a lasagna.’

  The Pneumonic Plague (about 9% of cases) resulted from the bacterium being transmitted, not by the fleas, but directly from the lungs of one infected person to another. In this case, the victims coughed up blood. The disease had a 90–95% death rate.

  The least common (1%), but most virulent and fast-acting, form was the Septicaemic Plague, the bacterium transmitted directly into the blood. The death rate was 100%.

  Such was the rapid decline in the health of an infected person, that the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio wrote that the victims ‘ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise’. He was probably referring to the Septicaemic Plague.

  Not a Bacterium?

  The conventional belief is that the Black Death was caused by a bacterium carried by fleas on rats. The French bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin helped to isolate this bacterium, hence its scientific name Yersinia pestis.

  But there have always been conflicting theories. One of the latest has been suggested by Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan, epidemiologists from the University of Liverpool. For various reasons, they claim that the Black Death is caused by a virus similar to the Ebola virus.

  Time will tell…

  It Wasn’t Around Then…

  So it all sounds very reasonable that this terrible series of rolling plagues would make its way into the popular culture. And what is more popular than a nursery rhyme sung by little kiddies?

  And this is where we hit the first problem with the myth.

  Unfortunately, the nursery rhyme was totally unknown for over 400 years after the plague hit Europe. During this long period of time—over four centuries—there were many eager hunters of nursery rhymes keen to document any rhyme they could find. However, there was not one single written reference to this rhyme before 1881, according to the authoritative Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, edited by Iona and Peter Opie.

  In fact, if this verse really did date back to 1347 and the Bubonic Plague, it would be older than Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. So why aren’t there any versions of this rhyme in Middle English?

  There is a similar nursery rhyme that was later described as being sung in New Bedford, Massachusetts around 1790. But the very first appearance in print of the ‘Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses’ nursery rhyme is in Kate Greenaway’s Mother Goose or The Old Nursery Rhymes in 1881.

  There Are Too Many Versions…

  The second problem is that there are many dozens of versions of this nursery rhyme, and only a very few could be interpreted as referring to the Bubonic Plague.

  In fact, the first known version from Massachusetts does not seem to be related at all to the Bubonic Plague.

  Ring-a-ring-a-rosie,

  A bottle full of posie,

  All the girls in our town

  Ring for little Josie.

  And here’s another version from the UK, which again seems to have nothing to do with the Bubonic Plague.

  The King has sent his daughter,

  To fetch a pail of water.

  Ash-a! Ash-a!

  We all kneel down.

  And just to hammer this home, here’s yet another version which would require a lot of imagination to link it to the Bubonic Plague.

  The Wedding Bells are ringing,

  And boys and girls are singing,

  Ash-a! Ash-a!

  All fall down.

  It’s Wrong…

  And here’s the third problem. The nursery rhyme is not very accurate at depicting the symptoms of someone suffering from the Bubonic Plague.

  No, a ‘rosy’ rash was not one of the symptoms of the Bubonic Plague. There were many manifestations in the skin, but a rosy rash was not one of them.

  ‘A pocket full of posies’? Over the years, there have been many interpretations of this line. They include the claim that this line really referred to the pus hidden under the skin before it oozed out; or something that you would put in the grave with the deceased; or flowers on the grave; or yes, something to either ward off the plague or to mask the stench of the rotting corpses.

  ‘A-tishoo’? Well, sneezing was not one of the symptoms of the disease. So some people have said that it should be ‘ashes’, which is what we turn into when we are cremated. However, in the panic of the Black Death, very few people were cremated—most of the dead were simply left w
here they fell and, much later, thrown into trenches.

  ‘We all fall down’? Well yes, when you die you might fall down (although not if you die in bed). But in many versions of this nursery rhyme, the players do not fall down at the end, but curtsey to each other. A curtsey is a gracious bending movement, not linked to morbid deaths in any way.

  Eyewitness Account—2

  The Italian poet and author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) wrote The Decameron. He also lived through the Black Death. He wrote: ‘…it began with swellings in the groin and armpit…some…as big as apples…some…shaped like eggs…appear over the entire body…covered with dark and livid spots…some were large and widely spaced while some were small and bunched together.’

  So How?

  So how did the myth of this nursery rhyme describing the Black Death arise?

  We can look to James Leasor, who in 1961 wrote The Plague and the Fire. As far as we can tell, he was the first to link the verse to the Black Death—six centuries after the plague first swept through Europe.

  Blame Mr Leasor.

  But how did the myth then take off? Two reasons. First, with so many versions of ‘Ring-a-Ring o’Roses’, all the versions that don’t fit were simply ignored. Second, virtually any meaning can be read into any song or verse—if you try hard enough.

  And remember, if all attempts to twist the meaning of the songs to your purpose fail, well, you can always try playing them backwards. With a lot of effort, you might even manage to find references to Satan Himself…

  References

  MacKenzie, Debora, ‘Ring a ring o’roses, A pocket full of posies, Atishoo! Atishoo! We all fall down’, New Scientist, 24 November 2001, p 34.

  Opie, Iona and Peter (Editors), The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp 364, 365.

  Black Death

  The Black Death was a horribly devastating pandemic of the Middle Ages. In the mid-1300s, the Black Death killed one-third of the population of Europe—a truly overwhelming and shocking catastrophe. Today, most Westerners believe that the Black Death of the 1300s began in Europe. This is not true.

  History of Epidemics and Pandemics

  More than a dozen major epidemics and pandemics have been documented in human history.

  Probably the earliest known epidemic—reported in I Samuel 5:6 in the Torah—dates back to the 11th century BC. In 430 BC, the Plague of Athens killed one-third of the city’s inhabitants.

  The first known pandemic was possibly the Plague of Justinian. It started in the region of Egypt or Ethiopia (in 541 AD), subsequently spreading to the then major city of Constantinople. At its peak, it killed 10,000 people per day. The Plague of Justinian eventually wiped out one-quarter of the inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean Region. In total, this pandemic killed about 100 million people in its first century of activity.

  Some 800 years later (in the mid-1300s), the pandemic known as the Black Death made its appearance. At the time, it was called ‘The Great Mortality’, but later historians called it the ‘Black Death’. The word ‘black’ here is derived from either the blackened skin of the victims, or from another meaning of ‘black’, i.e. ‘gloomy’, ‘terrible’ or ‘without hope’.

  But pandemics have also occurred in more recent times.

  Between 1855 and 1959, the Third Pandemic emerged from China and then swept across the world, killing 12 million people. (The Plague of Justinian was the first pandemic, the Black Death the second—this was the third.) In 1894, it killed approximately 90,000 people in Hong Kong and Canton. But by 1959, the worldwide death rate had dropped to 200 per year.

  And after World War I, the Great Influenza (also known as Spanish Flu) Pandemic erupted out of Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1918. This was the Fourth Pandemic. Technological advances in means of transport had sped up travel between countries, making it easier to spread the disease quickly across the globe. By 1920 it had killed 50–100 million people worldwide.

  Pandemic or Epidemic?

  A pandemic is like an epidemic, but bigger—it’s the Military-Industrial Full-Blown Version.

  In Greek, epi means ‘upon’ and demos means ‘people’, so an epidemic is an affliction upon the people. However, pan means ‘all’, so a pandemic affects all the people.

  Black Death of the 1300s

  The Black Death almost certainly arose in 1334 in the Chinese province of Hubei. About 90% of the people in Hubei died in the initial outbreak. (Some two-thirds of the populations in eight other areas of China died in revisitations of this Black Death from 1353 to 1354.)

  The Black Death appears to have spread to Europe along the Mongol trading routes. Its first major Eastern European contact was in Caffa, a trading city on the Crimean peninsula. (Caffa, currently called Feodossija or Feodosiya, is in the Ukraine. If Europeans remain true to their millennia-old tradition and continue to invade each other’s countries, and change the borders, who knows what this city will be called in the future.)

  Caffa is famous as the site of one of the earliest instances of using biological warfare as a weapon of war. You have probably heard the story of disease-ridden corpses being hurled into a besieged city—Caffa was almost certainly that city.

  Biological Warfare

  In World War II, the Japanese actually used the Black Death bacterium Yersinia pestis as a weapon. The infamous Unit 731, in then occupied Manchuria, deliberately infected both prisoners of war and Chinese civilians with the bacterium. To dehumanise the victims, they were called ‘logs’ by the Japanese.

  In the Cold War, the Soviets built up huge stockpiles of the bacterium for use in the event of an all-out war.

  Caffa—Trading City

  The coastal city of Caffa on the Black Sea was ideally situated. By land, caravan routes connected it to the Far East. By water, it allowed easy trade to central Russia and Moscow via the mighty 2,000 km long Don River. For this reason, the great Genoese merchant ships used Caffa as their main trading port on the Black Sea in the 1200s and 1300s.

  Caffa was originally founded in the 6th century BC by the Greeks from Miletos, who called it Theodosia. The Greeks probably chose this location because of the rich surrounding agricultural lands, which provided produce for trade. The city traded successfully as a port for a millennium, until the Huns destroyed it in the 4th century AD.

  It remained a minor village for about another millennium. In 1266, the Khan of the Golden Horde (the Mongols) re-established it as a trading port in an agreement with the Genoese. But relations between the Mongols and the Genoese were always uneasy and, over the years, it was besieged, set fire to and abandoned, before being finally re-established in 1312.

  In the 1340s the thriving Genoese city of Caffa was very cosmopolitan, accommodating not just the Genoese, but also Turks, Venetians, Armenians, Greeks, Jews and yes, Mongols. It was very heavily fortified by two strong concentric walls, with 6,000 homes inside the inner wall, and 11,000 inside the outer wall.

  For various reasons, relations between the Genoese and the Mongols again deteriorated. The Mongol leader Janiberg besieged Caffa in 1343, was pushed back by an Italian relief force in 1344, but renewed the siege in 1345. In 1346, after a long trip from China, the Black Death reached the besieging Mongol troops.

  Black Death

  How the Black Death ‘got around’ in the early days

  Flying Corpses

  We do not have eyewitness accounts of the effects of the Black Death on the actual siege. But we do have the accounts of Gabriele de’ Mussi, who lived from c. 1280 to c. 1356. He definitely does not claim to have seen what he describes at the siege of Caffa, because he writes: ‘Now it is time that we passed from east to west to discuss all the things which we ourselves have seen…’ So he implies that his reports from Caffa (in the East) are second-hand, while his descriptions from Genoa (in the West) are based on his personal observations. However, he seems to be reliable, because his accounts of other events are consistent and, in agreement with, ot
her writers.

  The Black Death struck the Mongols who were attacking the city of Caffa, killing ‘thousands upon thousands every day’. They died almost as soon as the swellings appeared in their armpits and groins. Gabriele de’ Mussi writes: ‘The dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease, and realising that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside.’

  It sounds very reasonable.

  Historical records tell us that a military trebuchet (a large medieval siege engine for hurling missiles) could hurl a 100 kg load some 300 m—modern reconstructions of trebuchets have easily reached 200 m. The diseased corpses would have been badly mangled by the impact of landing, and bodily fluids would have gone splattering in all directions. The defenders themselves would have had cuts and abrasions thanks to the siege, and could have, therefore, become easily infected. Direct transmission of the plague from person to person is still common. Between 1970 and 1995 there were about 284 cases of plague recorded in the USA. In about 20% of the cases, the bacterium was transmitted directly from one person to another.