The Great Mortality

The Great Mortality
by John Kelly

I believe that this is the "free" book from the "Buy Two Get One Free" trap that sucked me in during that last fateful Barnes and Noble trip. What can you do? I blame it all on Andrew.

Anyway, this is a book about the Black Death. Not the most cheerful topic, but an interesting one. In case anyone hasn't noticed, I am literally and totally obsessed with medicine. It's a problem. It will hopefully be less of a problem when I get my happy self into medical school. Fingers crossed.

Anyway. The man that wrote this book has made his living writing about science and medicine, but it seems from his bio at the end of the book that he also has something of a history obsession. The combination makes for a pretty good book on a topic that falls somewhere along the intersection of medicine and history. He seems to understand more than enough about the science to talk about it (as much as anyone can, since the science of a epidemic so long ago is fuzzy at best anyway) but clearly the history is what excited him. More specifically, the detailed and horrific personal accounts written during the plague.

He says that he started this book "for a very modern reason. In an age of the avian flu, Ebola and AIDS, I wanted to take an anticipatory glance backward at the greatest pandemic in human history." In looking back, he has focused on the human story of the plague. He seems determined in the face of the destruction to see the strength of human character, and in that, I think that he's right. It truly is amazing that people kept writing wills, that they managed to bury bodies, that people got out of bed in the morning as the population was cut in half by something that they simply did not understand.

The destruction that the Black Death brought really is well outside the realm of comprehension. We're talking about a time in which, in most of Europe, one out of every two people died horribly. That's hard to wrap your head around. Even though Kelly makes every effort to keep the humanity of these residents of the Middle Ages intact by quoting their own words or focusing on the story of a single family or village to represent one area, I think that at some point, one has to become desensitized, at least I felt like I did. You can only read a sentence like "And in such and such a place in 1348 the Black Death claimed 40-50% of the city." so many times before it just starts to feel like "yep. That's what happens. Oh well." I know that sounds callus, but that's the way it is. Especially since as shocking as the level of devastation is, even with Kelly's great and admirable effort to keep the victims human, these are still people that died 800 years ago, and that helps to keep a certain distance.

Anyway, I do have to say that this is decidedly a book more for the history buff than the science buff, since the science is a little ambiguous. Kelly's writing is focused on the routes the plague travelled and how the character was slightly different in different places. (The English managed to bury everyone facing the same way in neat little rows, some other places failed to manage burials at all really.) He devotes a chapter to the anti-Semitic reactions as well as to the Flagellants, but the majority of the story is just following the plague from place to place.

At times it gets a little repetitive. The story may be slightly different in France than in England, but not too too much, and sometimes it seems as if the same little vignettes are repeated. Maybe that's meant to say something about how we're all really the same, but I could have done with a little less of it.

Of course, the history leaves the scientist in me staring at closed doors, because while Kelly is very clear on the PATH that the plague travelled around Europe, the actual METHOD of that travel is a little more ambiguous. The virulence and movement patterns of the plague of the great mortality are very different and much more frightening than those of the third pandemic of plague, which was in the late 1890s and studied with the technology of that day. Of course for me the question is "what is the difference?!" They have extracted plague DNA from these Black Death burial pits, but understandably I would assume that it's not enough to do an in depth analysis of virulence factors. Of course that is the stuff that I would be more interested in.

But what can you do when you're reading about something that happened about 800 years ago?

I'm not sure how much learning about the Black Death can inform us about the way that our world today would look in the face of a deadly pandemic. At least in today's world (or the part of today's world that anyone reading either this blog or this book lives in) people understand that disease is caused by microbes. This one belief I believe dramatically changes the way that we would experience illness even on a massive level. While there are certainly some ignorant bigots that will blame AIDS on gay people or other such foolishness, I like to believe that we are past the point of burning Jews because they must have poisoned the wells. I think that in the face of understanding what we are fighting, as we certainly would at least in part in the face of a pandemic would give people something to hold on to and something to hope for (a cure, a vaccine, etc.).

That's what's really amazing about the fact that the society in many places continued to function in the face of this pandemic. In their world there was no reason for it, there was no microbe to fight or protect against, no real way to treat symptoms or limit transmission. There was nothing to do but wait for death, and the fact that people held it together to the extent that they did in the face of something like that gives us a lot to hope for on down the road.

Three down, seven to go.