|
People did not know that infected rats carried the
disease. They thought it was a punishment from God for being wicked. They
believed if you were bad, you would get the plague and die.
The towns were hit
the hardest. There was no sanitation in the towns. People threw their garage
out on the street. To a rat, coming off a ship docked at port, the towns must
have seemed like heaven.
Medieval knowledge of health, hygiene, and medical practices was very
limited. Commoners and nobles alike took infrequent baths. The peasants slept and
worked in the same clothes for days and even weeks at a time without washing
themselves or their clothes. The nobles were not much better. Soap was made of
lye, which was very rough on the skin. There was no toothpaste or
toothbrushes. People used watered spices on their lips and teeth, but all that
did was briefly hide the smell of rotting teeth. Peasants died young from malnutrition and the simplest of
diseases. Women died in childbirth from ignorance. People handled cattle and
then directly handled food.
Even before the plague, what is amazing really is that anyone
lived. The
truth is, only the very strong survived. But the strong had no defense against
the Black Death. No one was safe. And millions of people died.
Outbreaks of the plague continued for two hundred years.
The cause of the plague was not discovered until the 20th century (1900's.)
Today, this disease is called the bubonic plague. We have a vaccine for the
plague should an outbreak ever happen again. We're lucky. The people in the
Middle Ages did not have vaccines to protect themselves from many diseases as
we do today.
|
