Do Go On - 573 - The Black Death

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

The Black Death or The Plague, was a devastating global plague pandemic that swept across Europe, Asia and North Africa from 1346 to 1353 killing a large percentage of Earth's population. On this episode we look at where it came from, how it spread and how it changed the course of humanity.This is a comedy/history podcast, the report begins at approximately 08:32 (though as always, we go off on tangents throughout the report).For all our important links: https://linktr.ee/dogoonpodCheck out our other podcasts:Book Cheat: https://play.acast.com/s/book-cheatPrime Mates: https://play.acast.com/s/prime-mates/Listen Now: https://play.acast.com/s/listen-now/Who Knew It with Matt Stewart: https://play.acast.com/s/who-knew-it-with-matt-stewart/Jess Writes A Rom-Com: https://shows.acast.com/jess-writes-a-rom-comOur awesome theme song by Evan Munro-Smith and logo by Peader ThomasDo Go On acknowledges the traditional owners of the land we record on, the Wurundjeri people, in the Kulin nation. We pay our respects to elders, past and present.REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING:https://www.historytoday.com/archive/black-death-greatest-catastrophe-ever https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35064071https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-plague https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicine/bubonic-plague-first-pandemic https://jmvh.org/article/the-history-of-plague-part-1-the-three-great-pandemics/https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-Death https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zdkssk7#zc9gg7h https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-02/nursery-rhyme-meanings-often-urban-myths/8225910 https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/septicemic-plague#diagnosis https://www.who.int/news/item/29-09-2026-who-reports-latest-global-trends-in-cholera--meningitis-and-plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death#Consequences Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Well, our Canada tour is officially over, but don't worry, there are still plenty of opportunities to see us live. October's going to be huge in the year, 26, this year, because we've got a bunch of things happening. I'm in Brisbane at Good Chat Comedy Club on the 1st and a 3rd of October doing a stand-up show with Surin and a Who New It podcast. Also, doing a stand-up show at the Bendigo Comedy Festival on the 14th of October. before we're all reuniting once more in Melbourne town, Dave. What the frick is going on there? It's the best time of you. It's the cheerful, earful podcast festival.

It's taking place again at Humdinger Studios, loads of pods, and we're doing many of them. Yes. This is October 24. That's the Saturday afternoon and October 25. We're doing do go on and who knew it on the Saturday. Then we're doing do go on and book sheet on the Sunday. And then I believe Matt, also on the Sunday, you're doing a live primates.

There's a bonus primates. Yeah, finally going to finish the April run of shows. Ooh. It was meant to be counting down on the top five topics, and that's gotten away from me. So we're going to finish it in October. Perfect. And these tickets are available to see us live in person in the studio

or streamed anywhere in the world, live or on catch-up. So have you going to be in bed because you live somewhere on the other side of the world? Say Saskatoon, for example. Which I learned recently is the same place as Saskatchewan or vice versa. That's right. You can watch it live or on catch-up. to do go onpod.com for tickets to all of these shows. Hello and welcome to another episode of Do Go On.

My name is Devornikey and as always I'm here with Jess Perkins and Matt Stewart. Whoa! The big three! Oh my God. It's Block Week 2. I'm so excited. Oh my God, I'm so excited. And I need you to rain in that excitement.

Yeah, I felt that that was a bit much. But below the belt, that's not appropriate for work. Can you rein that in, please? Oh, you're talking about me not wearing pants right now. We know, even though. I wasn't sure. I had a feeling. But you know, when you're like, is this a faux part?

I forget. Yeah, that's fair enough. It's been so long since I went to finishing school. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's been a long time. I'm pretty close to finishing school after him not wearing any pants. Anyway, good stuff there. Good stuff.

So to speak. Happy block, everyone. Happy block, everyone. This is week to a block, which means I'm about to tell you about the seventh most requested topic of block. If you're joining us for the first time or for the first time in a while.

Welcome back. Welcome back. What we do here is we're taking intents to report on a topic. Often suggested to us by one of the listeners. We go away, do a bit of research. And during block, Matt puts together a massive poll, massive topic poll should be, specific thousands of votes have been tabulated and we're counting.

I'm really going to get these pants, but I'm a massive bowl. This year we are counting down across Blocktover slash Bluvember, which has been annexed as it has been the last few years, the top eight most voted four topics. So they're all big. They're all big. They're all big. This is the big time.

Yeah. It's an exciting time. It's the best time of year. Christmas can go fuck itself. Block is here, baby. This is it. Christmas added two good for too long. Fuck off.

Fuck off Christmas. And that's coming from us. We love Christmas. We love Christmas. Christmas is brilliant. But compared to Blove Amber at Blochtober, it can get fucked. Get in the toilet Christmas. You are boring.

You get your bet to get flushed. That's if Jason Stasem just killed Christmas. Yeah. Put in like Santa's head in the toilet. Yeah. That's really good. Actually, that's very literal. What would he do?

He's flushing sound as head in the toilet. What would he say there, Dave? Poor. I'm thinking like something's coming to me of like a jingle all the way or something like that. Oh, okay. Yeah. What about like? Tinkle all the way.

Yeah, sprinkle, but tinkles in better. Tinkle's good. Yeah, perfect. Yeah. That's good. Merry flush mess. When we work together, we are unstoppable. Yeah.

It's cr- why do we do it more often? Yeah. What about this? We come from the school of no but. Okay. Jason Statham is a gardener. Yes. Wronged by Christmas.

Of course. He attacks Santa. He hits him with gardening influence and he says, ho, ho, ho hits him in the knee caps with a ho. Yep. And then we build the movie around. Perfection. Yeah.

And it makes sense though, Dave, because Christmas trees, you know, maybe he's a gardener and he, oh, yes. His gardens have been ruined by, like, being taken over by like a Christmas tree farm. Oh, Oh, that big Christmas has come in. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Ruining his small gardening business. And he turns out he was Black Ops and he's been drawn back in. He's always Black Ops drawn back in. He just wanted to retire in his garden. Anyway, we've gone on a tangent about Jason Statham early. Yeah, sorry. So always suggested by some of our fantastic listeners. And Dave, we always get onto the topic with a question.

Yes. Now, Block is a beautiful time of you. Also, an interesting time where we have to divvy up the topic. So for the only. time of the whole year, we kind of know what each other have reported on. Well, you say that, but my brain is not the best. So I've got a tangential question for your not best brain. Uh-huh.

I've got other parts of me are the best. Oh, my word. All right. Top three. Name them. Poor, good hair. One, two. One two plus the hair.

My hair's fine. Yeah. Jess rates righty over lefty. They're sisters, not twins. Okay, sorry about that. Sorry about that. Adopted as well by the look of it. Why are the different colours?

They share any DNA at all? I'm not even sure they're the same species. A bit of birth trauma. Well of them got dropped on its head of it. I don't know. I don't know. I'm so curious to know what AJ cuts out. Yeah.

Here's the topic, everyone. Here's the question to get on a topic. In ancient Egypt, what color represented fertility, rebirth? Purple. And the rich soil left behind by the flooding of the Nile River. Fertility? Purple, I think, was a great question. Orange.

What did you say? What was before, orange? Dangerine. Oh, okay. No, I thought you said the correct answer. Black? It is black. Deep.

I was going to say, yeah, dark soil left behind on the Nilever. Yeah, in ancient Egypt. Black represented fertility. Actually, black's a shade, not a color. That was big in primary school for me. I'll rephrase the question. What's your favorite color? Who's the fuck when?

Answer, you got him. Absolutely got him. No, I agree. I agree. So the answer is black. But today we aren't talking about the black rebirth or black rebirth, but we were talking about the opposite, the black death. Oh.

See what I've done there? The plague that ravaged Europe. North Africa and Asia in the mid-1300s. Wow. And this topic, it's a big one. The plague. It is a big one. Been suggested by multiple people and thank you to everyone has done so,

including Bianca Henshaw from Australia, Victoria Horsham. It's in a strange order there. From Horsham. Malcolm Loura from Dublin. Heather Forbes from Fife in Scotland. Ellis Leibitt or Libet from Ipswich, Coleman Pringle. Oh, yeah.

From Malaga in Spain. Holy shit. Coleman Pringle. That's one of the best. From the Pringle dynasty? I reckon, can we put Coleman Pringle as a character in the Statham's Gardner film? Yes. Could he be Coleman Pringle?

The gardener has been wrong. Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, Coleman Pringle. Jason Statham is called Coleman Pringle. And like... Coleman Pringle. He hasn't killed anyone for a long time. He hasn't shot a gun when he does and he says,

once you pop, you can't stop. And then he goes, like, What about that? And he's also, he'll be able to say at some point, bring you all the way. Yes, yes. It works on many, many levels. Maybe. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, we really got to get this in development. Yeah. We are very good at this. Really good. Should my next series be... Hollywood's calling. Jess writes a Jason Statham movie. That's a great puzzle.

Instead of Jess writes a rom-com, let's just... And we could whip it out in like three episodes. Like, it'll be a very short series. I was going to say, if you get the three of us in, we knock that out pretty quickly. smart. It would be so fun to write one of those and then do the read. Yeah. Man, it would be fun.

We'd be fighting over who gets a best statement. We'd be doing in three acts. We'd get one act to each. Yeah, I think that's only fair. Anyway, Colman Pringle from Malagheris suggested the Black Death as well as Stephanie Perner from New York, Lisa Rauman from Rockland, California, Romney Stevens from Western Australia,

Meg from Melbourne, Adam McVeigh from Melbourne, and finally, Nell also from Melbourne. Wow, some great names. in there. Obviously, Coleman Pringle really caught our attention, but there's some really good ones in there. Yeah, nothing to be embarrassed by in that list. Absolutely not. Yeah, nobody should feel ashamed of their name there. A rare week. Yeah. Often there's like a real dud in there. Yeah, yeah. If you get 15, any 15 names together, there's always a dud. I mean, look at the three of us. All three of us,

you go, Jess, Matt and Dave, all three should be ashamed. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But Coleman Pringle. My God. All right, let me take you back. The Roman Physic. decision Galen coined the term plague over 2,000 years ago to describe any... It's either Galen from Big Brother season two. I'll stop talking. There's almost certainly a relation. I'm on my second coffee, just a warning for the listeners. Turn off my mic at any point if you feel the need.

So that's a warning to listeners. Is it an apology to us? Yeah, you know, I think if you read between the lines, There's an apology there. Yep. Yep. I'm reading between the lines there. Yep.

Roger that. Everyone at home is holding up three fingers. Let's let Dave get through one sentence. You're literally not even a sentence here. I know. The Roman physician Galen coined the term plague over 2,000 years ago to describe any quickly spreading fatal disease. And the plague or plagues have afflicted humans for thousands of years. The Justiniac plague was the first historically recorded bubonic plague pandemic, ravaging the

Byzantine Empire, the Sassanian Empire, and the entire Mediterranean basin in the year 541. Wow. And at least 18 waves of plague spread across the Mediterranean basin into distant areas like Persia and Ireland between 541 and 750. Wow. So this is, and that's hundreds of years before the main plague we're talking about today. So we've had diseases for like ages. For ages.

Wow. Yeah. And it took them forever to do anything about it, to be honest. Yeah, right. But the Black Death is the name. Because I thought it was God for a long time, right? Yeah, they're like, well, it's just, this is God's will. It's just a little, you know, it's like when you spring clean the wardrobe.

We're just kind of cleaning out some of the stuff we don't need anymore, like little children. Poor people, you know. The Black Death is the name given to the first wave of the bubonic plague that swept across Europe in the 1300s. Interestingly, the name of the Black Death is a relatively new invention. In English, prior to the 18th century, the event. was called the Pestulence or Great Pestulence, the Plague or the Great Death. I like Pestulence best, I think. You want me to call it that a bit more?

That's interesting. The last Friends of Rome album was called Cup of Pestulence, and I've never thought to look up what that meant. I'm a little bit closer to cracking the code now. Now I just have to figure out what cup means. Like a goblet. Ah, yes. According to history.

Thank you for. putting it in terms of understanding. According to history today about the Black Death, they write, the frightening name, however, only came several centuries after its visitation and was probably a mistranslation of the Latin word Atra,

which means both terrible and black. So the people were probably trying to just call it the terrible plague. Sure. It translated to the terrible death, the Black Death, the Black Plague, and then it's just over time. It's got good brand recognition.

It is pretty badass, in terms of a disease. But I did think, I thought maybe, you know, people's boils and stuff went black or something, but it's nothing like that. It's just a miscommunication. Yes, but there is a bit of things going black, unfortunately, on people's bodies.

That's made it sound like your dick turns black. I think that actually could happen. Once your dick turns black, you don't turn back. Is that something people say? Yeah. It's a common from that. That's a correct. memory of that saying, yes.

Yes. So, despite the fact that it's not historically called the Black Death, I'll refer to it as the Black Death and the plague and maybe even the pestilence for you, Jess. And it's not surprising that it reached the status, as it is one of the worst plagues to ever before humanity. When you talk about the plague, this is the one you're talking about, so widespread and deadly, it touched all parts of society, changed human culture forever, and it's still widely studied and debated seven centuries later.

Wow. But where did it come from? Well, the plague later known as the Black Death originated in Asia in 1346, and it is now widely accepted that the plague was caused by the Yersinia pestis bacteria, although this wouldn't be discovered until 1894. Oh, wow. For ages, they did not really know where it was coming from. And it was spread to humans by black rats and fleas.

Black rats also known as house rats or ship rats. Rats were commonly found in homes, villages and towns due to poor hygiene conditions such as raw sewage being routinely dumped in streets. Black rats, as opposed to brown or grey rats, like to live close to people. Oh. Interesting. They're amongst it. They like to live close to people?

Yeah. But then people see them and go like, ah! Yeah, and they go, I just want to be your friend. Oh, that's actually really sad. Oh, come. That's so sad. What a curse. Yeah.

Poor little. It feels like a Greek tragic sort of thing. The curse of the black rat. All they want to do is be loved by humans. But they're scorned. It's interesting, we've already had a couple of things that make the black name, the accidental black name make more sense. Yeah, that's spread by black rats.

I guess you could call the rat the black death because the disease started in them and then spread. So where the black lats ribbed, where the black rats. Did I say that weirdly? Yeah, you said black. Yeah, you said lots. Great, thank you so much. Where the black rats lived in great numbers and density, they could become what's called a plague reservoir.

One of the rats would get infected with plague, and 10 to 14 days later, the plague would have killed most of the colony. And here's where fleas come into it. The fleas that were living on the rats gathered in greater numbers on the surviving rats after the other hosts died, because they have to live on a living host.

And eventually, after a few days of fasting, they look for another host, and that became humans. Because all the, you know, their rat friends are dead. They've got to find somewhere else to live. If a flea that had bitten an infected rat jumped onto a person and then bit them, it would transmit bubonic plague. I see, I, when I was in Edinburgh two months ago and did a tour of like the underground city and learnt all of this and forgot all of it until right now, And I was like, yeah, there's something about rats on that, too, at that time.

The retention is, it's non-existent. It's gone. But I, yeah, I remember that now. It's retained a bit deep down. Yeah, deep. Like, it's coming back to you. Somewhat, yeah. Kind of.

Yeah, half. Like, that was the hidden city in Edinburgh. It's like in your hidden memory. Yes. You just got uncover it. You just got to, you know, go down an elevator. All we have to do is tell you the information exactly again. And you go, oh, yeah.

used to know that. I used to do. That's vaguely familiar. That's my life. That's vaguely familiar. You can say that about any fact you learn. I get home and go, this place is vaguely familiar. Huh.

I've been here before. Yes, Jess. This is your bed. Huh. So according to the Journal of Military and Veterans Health, when infected the proventriculus in the flea's digestive tract becomes blocked by a mass of bacteria, the flea continues to feed biting with increasingly or increasing frequency. and agitation, and in an attempt to relieve the obstruction, the flea regurgitates the accumulated

blood together with a mass of Yersinia pestis bacilli directly into the bloodstream of the host. The fleas multiply prolifically on their host, and when the host dies, they leave immediately, infesting new hosts, and thus creating the foundations for an epidemic. Basically, they kill and then they move on quickly. Heartless little fox, aren't they? Yeah. But the thing is that, like, if they knew, they don't want their host to die. because the host is keeping them alive.

They'd be sad to know that they're killing the one thing keeping them alive too. And they, so to the flick. Yeah, they keep thinking, oh, not again. Yeah, the feelings just think they have the worst luck. Oh, I'm a curse. I'm cursed. I find a nice new host, I think this is the one. And then I'll give them a little nibble.

They're dead. I don't know what's going on. I've had to move eight times this week. Great location. Close to everything. Yeah. Beautiful size. Beautiful views.

Room for growth for my family. And then they're bloody went and died. It's actually really sad for fleas. Jason Statham is a flea. Sad flea. Just when he thought he was out, his host went and died. And now I was looking for revenge. Who did this?

Oh, I did. Oh no And answered him And taking his own little flea life Looking in the mirror Yeah And he'd say Flea this

And he threw a grenade Would a grenade take out fleas You reckon? Are they like cockroaches? Yeah, a few of them But yeah They keep going They're so small

So basically Fleas were everywhere And we're very easy To unknowingly transport The little disease filled barsters from place to place. So they just travel on people and on animals and they spread. And it wasn't just rats and fleas that spread the disease to humans,

as humans were able to spread it too. I didn't know this, but there were actually three types of plague. There's the most famous bubonic plague spread by rats and fleas. It took three to five days to incubate, and then the common symptoms were, and warning it is a little bit gross. The appearance of painful bubos, which are pain. painful inflamed swelling of lymph nodes, hence the name bubonic plague. And these were seen in the groin, neck and armpits, and later secreted pus and blood.

And they'd get to the size of an egg and be quite painful and quite. They protrude a lot. What kind of egg, Dave? You can't just say size of an egg, mate. Yeah, what chicken egg? Is that the default egg to you? Because to me, it's an emu egg. Yeah.

I was actually thinking about a human egg. Oh, it's fucking tiny. You wouldn't even see that. It's several hundred million of them. Wow. Gosh, we've got to get it. Yeah, that egg scale. The eggs have to go metric, don't you think?

Yeah. Yeah. The eggs have to go metric, don't you think? Yeah. Don't you think? Yeah. It just makes sense. Yeah.

Come on. It's the 21st century eggs. Come on. Grow up. Jason Stapham is an egg. I mean, he'd be played by. A good egg. It would be a great egg.

But just to answer Matt's question, you made a chicken egg. Yeah, I never questioned it when I read it in the sources, but people were saying egg size. I reckon they're probably thinking, yeah, an average sized chicken egg. Not even one of these extra large ones, you see. Got it. I just thought, Dave, you're so fancy that you probably meant like a quail. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

You're a fancy man with fancy taste. Yeah, that's right. I like to eat small animals. That's how fancy you're always. Yeah, that's right. There's more. The more defenseless the animal, the more advertising. So the buboes...

He gets a knife and fork out to eat a little roast flea. Little bugs. Yum. Oh, fancy. Delicious. So the buboes, that's these egg size things, were then followed by acute fever and vomiting blood. And then fingers toes...

I fucking knew it. I was waiting. You said acute fever and I just waited for the delay for him. together. Oh, okay. Well, that's funny because Acute actually has two meanings. Wait, what? But I'm glad you picked up on the right one.

I was worried that that would be misinterpreted. That's what happens when I get a fever. It's very cute. Very cute. Yeah, you don't complain at all. No, no, no, I handle fevers incredibly well. Kill me. Just kill me already.

So you get fever, you vomit blood. And then fingers, toes, and parts of the skin sometimes. You vomit fingers. Oh no. That's one of the worst things I've ever heard. Oh, get fucked. It is not. I've said way worse. Way worse. Way crooker. The image of that that you're just vomiting up fingers, it's pretty horrendous. It's gross. I agree.

So fingers, toes and parts of the skin sometimes turn black, which is what we're talking about for. Victims usually die between two and seven days after being infected and the mortality rate was about 50%. That's a very quick. Quick death, isn't it? Quick death. And, like, you're feeling you're very sick. Really ill. Yep. That's horrific.

Wow. 50-50 is interesting. So you're full recovery if you recover? I'm not sure about a full recovery. Like, it's pretty awful, particularly if you've, like, your fingers have gone gangreness and they didn't really have much way to deal with that back then apart from. Once your fingers go black, they never go back.

Do you get to keep the eggs? The neck egg, for instance. Yeah, that's mine, that neck egg. I want to keep the groin egg Can I add that? Look up on the shelf Anything that helps bulk it out in a speedo I'm looking a little too flat in a speedo

Look at that protrusion Yes it's in a little spot But that's mine It's all part of it It all adds up to the hole I'll just put like a sock on the other side Really bulk of it even it up If you're not using it

your neck egg, could I have it, please? Can I graph that to my groin, even it out? Are you done with that? Can I have that? Can I have that? I thought you're talking about the riff, Dave. You done with that? I thought so far sick.

No. No, no. Are you guys done? Are you done? Can I talk about the plague now, please? Can you talk about it's having fun now, please? So everything I've talked about so far, that's the bubonic plague, but the one you've heard of.

Yes. Then there's also the new. Pneonic Plague, which was spread from person to person. So, bubonic plague, you get that from the fleas, which get from the wrath. Mnemonic plague spread from person to person through coughing or sneezing, which spread via air droplets, which contained plague bacteria affecting the victim's lungs. Like pneumonia. It's a PN kind of.

Yeah. Absolutely. This type of plague was particularly brutal and had a near 100% mortality rate. Ooh. However, this is the good news. Norwegian professor and black death expert Ole J. Benedict Tao Well, quite from a few times. He writes,

however, contrary to what is sometimes believed, this form is not contracted easily, spreads normally only episodically or incidentally, and constitutes therefore normally only a small fraction of plague cases. So it's only a few percent are actually this mnemonic plague. So I think everyone thinks that I get the plague and you live with me, Jess. You're going to catch it for me for sure. I don't live with you, Dave.

Yeah, but let's see you did do. I don't want to, thank you. Well, I've signed the lease. Your name's on there. I signed you. That's right. I forged you. That's right.

And if you're not there, well, I'm going to destroy the place and you'll have to pay for it. So you may as well live with me. We have families, don't. Anyway, so I think people thought... I imagine if that did spread easily, then probably humans would have just been wiped out almost. Yeah, because this is like 100%. I think that's the thing about, like, epidemics. For it to take off, it can't be too deadly.

because everyone quickly dies. Like, I think that's why Ebola in Africa is, like, horrific, and it's terrible because it's so deadly. But I think I've read once that people are less worried about it becoming a global thing because it's so deadly. It kills its hosts before they're able to pass it on to other people. Which is awful in another way, obviously. Horrific, yeah, absolutely. But that's, yeah, I didn't think about that.

But, yeah, because they have to live long enough to give it to, you know, for it to keep going. Otherwise, it dies that quickly. That's the thing about most people. People are getting the bubonic plates. It's 50-50. Yeah. And that's obviously, yeah,

without treatment. So, sorry, you're saying, like, people assumed that if we live together, which I know is your dream, that it would spread easily. I'd cough it onto you. Yeah.

I don't think that's actually the case. You would probably get it too because you're getting bitten by the same fleas as me. Yeah, yeah, but I'm not, it's just not like if you come around to my house and I cough on you,

you're going to get it. Yeah. It's just that we're getting bitten by the same stuff. I still, like, I still, and we've had this conversation before, I'd still ask you to stop coughing on me. Stop inviting me over, opening the door, coughing on me.

No. Okay. Well, that's right. Okay. And can we please get rid of the fleas, Dave? Yeah. They are my friends. They are my dinner.

They haven't left me down before. So, and finally, there is septicemic plague, which is in the blood. It's highly fatal. Also causes tissue death. Gangrene in the fingers, hands, toes, nose, lips. A septicemic plague is also a complication of pneumonic or bubonic plague, but can also occur independently, and that was also in the low percentage of people getting that one. Like septic. Yeah.

So that's nasty. That's bad. The last two are really, really nasty ones, but the other one, the bubonic is the most common. So where did it begin in humans? Where did it make the jump? Well, it probably started on the steps of Asia, back with descendants of our old blocktoba friends, the Mongols. Ah. This is when I first heard about steps

because I remember when you told us about Gangus Khan who kept talking about the step I'm like, what the for? What's the step? It's just an area of... An area, like the grassland area of... Right. Of Asia.

I'm trying to think of which part, I guess Western Asia. All the way over to Mongolia above China and that kind of thing. Genghis Khan had died over a century earlier at this point and the Khanate had split up, as I said on the end of of the episode we did on him. And the Western sector, ruling over parts of Russia and Eastern Europe, became known as the Golden Horde, which is such a badass name. It's pretty good. In 1346, it was known in European seaports that a plague epidemic was present in the east, with a plague reservoir stretching from the northwestern shores of the Caspian Sea into southern Russia.

So this is where it all kicked off. Russia was protected from spread because the Golden Horde had converted to Islam decades earlier under Genghis Khan's grandson and no longer traded with Christians. But don't worry, they won't miss out and it would eventually catch up with Russia too. But for a while, even though they were the neighbours of these people, they didn't have any contact with them. But Europeans came into contact with the Horde in 1347 when Khan Janiburg of the Golden Horde laid siege to the town of Kaffa, which is now Fyodorosia in Ukraine, and a Genoese trading town on the shores of the Black Sea. So the people from Genoa are in charge of this city.

The siege was unsuccessful. But before the hoard left, they dropped off a nasty present for the Genoese inside the city. They catapulted over the walls, the corpses of people who had died from the plague. And that's how Europeans first came in contact with it. Isn't that nasty stuff? Like full biological warfare. What the fuck?

That's crazy. Here's my dead brother. Foofooge. Wow. That's, I was, I think it, was it Queen Elizabeth I think. Would she have been raining around this time, Dave, during the plague? No, she was a bit longer. She's later with Shakespeare.

Right. Well, yeah, there was, one was around the time, was. really paranoid that her enemies were going to rub the plague on her clothes, so she just didn't really trust anyone, because people would use the plague in hectic ways like that.

I mean, it could be here because, spoiler, the plague actually keeps coming back for centuries after this. So, in the 600, that could have been her. Yes, and I probably, and I'd recently reread that Bill Bryson book about Shakespeare, so that's probably where I heard. Uh-huh.

Jess is shaking her head and disgust of the name. She loves Bill. Of Bill being brought up on this podcast of all podcasts. The plague feels like a real. We're going to go to listen to like Bill, Jess. Okay. What do you say to them? I say that's fine.

50% of our audience love Bill Bryson. I say fucking try reading something else. I don't have a problem with Bill Bryson. I have a problem with how often you bring up. It's like it seems to be the only way you get information. Dave's here telling you something and you're still like, Bill Bryson said, shut the fuck up about Bill Bryson.

I don't care. Have you heard of Emily Henry? Yeah, read something a little smutty for fuck sake. Sorry, you're right, Jess. It is tedious when people say, you know, maybe on a walking tour or something like that and they bring up. Well, hang on, you just did that. Did what?

Oh, wow. Did I learn something? Boom, boom. He's doing his own fucking theme music. He's put the sun he's on. He's doing his own fucking theme music. Hey, if you want to get the video feed, jump on our Patreon, worth it this week. Matt, can I just say that was one of the coolest things you've ever done.

That says a lot, doesn't it? Yeah. Because he's incredible. cool. Yeah, exactly. So they... High stand has already been said. So the golden order catapulting plague-filled bodies

over the walls of this Genoese town. That's diabolical. And again from the Journal of Military and Veterans Health. In panic, the Genoese traders fled to galleys, which is their boats, with sickness clinging to their bones, as written in quotation marks, to Constantinople and across the Mediterranean

to Messina, Sicily, where the great pandemic of Europe started. Wow. So it was just an for a few boatfuls of these people to get it, and they just brought it with them. Wow. A Britannica then breaks down the spread, and it is wild.

From Kaffa, which is that town that had the bodies over the wall, Genoese ships carried the epidemic westward to the Mediterranean ports. Wentz, there's a great use of the word, whence. It spread inland, affecting Sicily, 1347, North Africa, mainland,

Italy, Spain and France, 1348, and Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Germany, and the low countries, that's the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg 1349. So over a couple of years, it just spreads all over Europe. A ship from Calais carried the plague to Melcombe, Regis in Dorset in August 1348.

It reached Bristol almost immediately and spread rapidly throughout the southwestern counties of England. London suffered most violently between February and May 1349, East Anglia and Yorkshire during that summer. Then the Black Death reached the extreme north of England, Scotland, Scandinavia and the Boland. Baltic countries in 1350. Wow. So over just a few years, Europe is just on fire with this thing.

That's crazy. And it spread particularly in summer when the fleas are active. So they found that it would die down a lot in winter because the fleas would become more dormant. And it would maybe even sometimes look like, oh, it's over for a bit. But then the sun comes out as much as it does in England. And then the fleas are back. Pop that.

To rub salt in the wound, of course, one of those years in the late 1340s was one of the hottest summers on record and longest summers on record. So it was perfect weather for these fleas just to keep on rocking. Yeah. The fleas are really enjoying this summer. Yeah. It's the hot, it's a flea summer. Not flea summer. Not flea summer.

Fleas up there playing the slap bass. Bidle-de-be-be-pim-pim. Not you flea. That's on the nose, mate. What a bit of you do you do. What a... God. And that's, I mean, you're a bass man yourself, Dave.

That was a hot bass wrist. You know that was spot on. Yeah. Is Flea somewhat of an idol to you? I know you're friends with the fleas. I'm friends with the fleas. Yes, flea is somewhat of an idol. If not the only idol I have.

Melbourne born? Melbourne born, we'll take that. Our flea. I think he moved to America when he was three. That little guy, that's our flea. That's our flea. Yeah, that's what he did to Melbourne. when he flee.

Is that, I don't know. Look, we give AJ, our editor, a lump of clay each week. And he chips away, and I really hope he gets rid of the shit. I really hope he does. We give him a lump. But whenever we do a live show, people suggest to me that he leaves a lot of stuff in that maybe could be edited out. We give him a lump of soiled clay.

It's certainly not like artistic grade clay. No, no, no, no. Yes. And I could have said, I could have said a block of marble. Oh, no. Now to think about it. Oh, no, no, no. But it's not, is it?

It's not. Heavily soil, really, really wet clay. Yeah. Like the sloth. It looks like a puddle. Yeah. Yeah. A slurry.

We give AJ a slurry every week. And what he turns at it to, he does his best. He does his best. He does his best. You cannot polish a turd he really tries. So the plague. Shout out to AJ.

Shout out to you, AJ. It was spread far and wide on ships, something that would have been possible in previous centuries. The ship technology and interconnectiveness of the trade routes combined with the highly contagious nature of the disease to create a new perfect storm. Infected rats on the ships died, but then the rat fleas would live on

and infect the crew both with illness but also stow away on their bodies, their clothing. It would infest the rice and their wheat grain. and other trade merchandise. These fleas are everywhere. They're getting into everything, aren't they? Again from our mate, Professor Olley J. Benedict Tao. He writes that it was ships.

And we did skip over this before, but Dave, what a name. Can we just get one more time? Professor Oleg J. Benedict Tao. That's, I mean, it's, it's so good. You can't. You can't really get, like, I can't get past the first name of Olae. Yeah, O'A.

That's incredible. Sometimes he's just called O.J. Benedict Tower, and even that's cool. That's cool. This guy's so cool soccer crowds chan his name. That's rare for an academic. Rare but not unheard of. People say, like, where do you find the fun in some of these grim topics? That's right.

And this is where it is. Usually the names of the sources. Yeah. Yeah. Usually European names. Yeah. That's what they are. Ones that we feel okay about joking around with.

So. We feel Olai about joking about. So let's say, uh, wow. Sunglasses are back on. I feel I need to give that context. So it's going to sound in.

if you're on the train listing to this. No, I think they'll get it. They'll be like, cool, he just sounds like he's got sunnies on now. Sounds like he just got a whole lot cooler. So again from the... Well, the thing is, if it doesn't make sense audio only, AJ, he'll edit it out. He's looking after the listeners, we believe.

That's true, but we also would like to point people towards the Patreon if they want to watch the video feed, the ad-free feed, it's all there for you. But you got to pay. So I'm going to quote from the prof again. He talked about how it was ships that's spread the disease, and that was the big difference. He writes, ships traveled at an average speed of around 40 kilometers a day, which today

seems quite slow. However, this speed meant that the Black Death easily moved 600 kilometers in a fortnight by ship, spreading in contemporary terms with astonishing speed and unpredictability. By land, the average speed or spread was much slower, up to only two kilometers per day along the busiest highways or roads, and about 0.6 kilometers, 600 meters per day along secondary lines of communication. So, yeah, it gets on a ship because they've all got rats on them. That's very common on a ship.

Now they've all got fleas on them, and now they've all got plague on them. Wow. Population density had increased in trade had flourished over the previous decades across Europe and societies were more connected than ever and even the most remote communities weren't safe from plague. Again from the prof, Benedict Dau, Iceland and Finland are the only regions that we know with certainty that avoided the black death because they had tiny populations with minimal contact abroad. It seems unlikely that any other region was so lucky. What about us?

This is Europe. Yeah? We're in Eurovision. It's true. What are we doing there? Why is Delta up there? Strap to a pole. How Delta. Our Delta. Actually, it was Kate Miller-Hideke's strapped to a pole. Yes, you was. Yeah. And it was. is awesome. Yeah, it actually was really, really awesome. Because of the incubation times and the fact that rats got sick and died first before the fleas looked for new hosts, there was often a delay before places realized that the black death was well and truly on their doorstep. One more time from the prof, Benedict Dau. He writes this for history today. It took time or some time for people to recognize that a terrible epidemic was breaking out among them and for chroniclers to note

this. The timescale varies. In the countryside, it took about 40 days for realization to dawn. In most towns with a few thousand inhabitants, six to seven weeks, in cities with over 100, oh, sorry, over 10,000 inhabitants, about seven weeks. And in the few metropolises with over 100,000 inhabitants, as much as eight weeks. Wow. So, and once it's, once, basically, once you realize it's here, it's like, oh dear. It's too late. It's really quite late. treatments were attempted, but with people not knowing the real cause for hundreds of years, they were sketchy at best. Back to our Roman friend Galen, who coined the term plague, his beliefs lasted for centuries and medieval doctors believed that illnesses, including the black death, were caused by an imbalance in the four humors. Yes.

And the four humors were black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood. The big four. The big four humans. And I think you could go to a comedy festival stage today, and they are still some of the funniest topics. Yeah, still represented. Yeah. Funny as.

Yeah. I reckon you open with the yellow bile. You go through to a phlegm and maybe close with the blood. Yes, agreed. Does that sound about right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Black bile. You just, that's my set list tonight, actually.

Yeah, perfect. A patient diagnosed with excess blood would undergo treatments such as bloodletting. Which attempted to rebalance the humours by removing excess blood. That's honestly crazy. We'll just take some of the blood out. That should be right. You've got too much blood. What the fuck is wrong with you?

This car has too much petrol. Train the take. Get it out. Take it out. How did that begin? It's the kind of thing that sounds like it came to him in a dream. Well, that must be real. Just absolutely have a stab at it.

Yeah. There's four. Humors, obviously. Yellow bile. No, we're patting them out too. Why are you putting bile in two? Yeah, there's two boils, but only one flam? Blood gets its own thing and balls broken up in a two.

Come on, come on. Come on, come on, Galen. Now we know there's five humors. You've got white blood cells, red blood cells. That's the main thing that you're going to tell us they learnt, and now they understand. They were so close. Well, they did the blood learning, and I will say it didn't help. the plague.

Huh. Huh. Just let you know. Others believe that the disease and its rapid spread had religious or supernatural causes. I don't know what you're talking about for. According to the BBC, some people believed God was the cause as a punishment for people's sins.

Flagellants would whip themselves to seek forgiveness from God. Others prayed to God for an end of the plague seeking divine mercy. So please make it stop. Come on. out. Astrologists believe the cause was the alignment of the planets. Others still believed in the ancient idea of tripanning where doctors would drill a hole in a patient's head to release bad spirits that were believed to have caused an illness.

Some doctors burst the buboes of patients with bubonic plague, which sounds so painful, but there is some evidence, and again, this is from the BBC, that this may have helped increased chances of survival. Pop the egg. Oh. Hey, can't make an omelette without popping a few bubonic eggs. It's hard listening to it now because we know, like, it's an infection. It's a disease.

But I understand at the time they're like, this was genuinely what they thought would help. But it's crazy to think about now. Yeah. All right, we'll just drill a hole in your head to let out the bad spirits. That's fucking terrible. Yeah. Like it must have sort of worked on someone for them to keep trying. Right?

Someone went, yeah, maybe I do feel a bit better. Like it must have had a placebo effect. You know what? I feel like the spirit was really good until they died. Until they died moments later. Yeah. But for a few moments, they felt fantastic. Yeah.

Then something else got them. Or they died and they went, wow, they're not complaining anymore. Yeah. I think it worked. Anyway. So there were attempts to control the spread, the general advice being get the hell out of town. Yep. The policy was, quote, leave quickly, go far and come back slowly.

The problem was the more at spread. It's like, well, where do you go? Yeah. It sounds like Iceland off in life. Yeah. But they wouldn't have wanted you. No. Interesting, a lot of public health measures that we would recognize today and many that we

lived through during COVID were created and implemented during the spread of the black death. measures included medical inspections from a plague doctor going door to door to inspect selected cases and isolating people and their families in their homes. Specific plague hospitals were built across Europe and according to the Science Museum UK, many remained as fever hospitals for infectious patients up until the 1900s, which is, you know, 550 years later. The COVID-type isolation that many travellers experienced just a few years ago were also implemented with the movement of people and goods falling under increasing restriction.

In 1347, for example, the Venetian authorities isolated ships in port for 30 days to ensure that they were not infected. The period was extended to 40 days, and the word quarantine comes from the Italian word for 40. Quaranta. Huh. There you go. There you go. And it comes from this time.

Because they're like 30 days, not enough. Let's make it 40. That becomes quarantine. Hmm. Fines were also introduced for people caught dumping waste in the streets as one of the leading theories of the day was that disease was spread by bad smells, bad air or my asthma. Oh, okay, yeah, bad smells.

That feels like they're getting warmer. Well, it is good because it helped them clean up. So whilst this isn't how disease is spread, the BBC notes, this may have helped a little in that dealing with waste in the streets may have helped to limit the number of the rats that were actually spreading the disease. So they are cleaning it up. Yeah, they just dump waste in the gutters, in the street. We're not even gutters.

It's so gross. It's funny if you think that if bad smells are responsible for all the sickness, it's like, I can't imagine a smellier time in history. Yeah, yep, it would have really fucking reeked. Hygiene was pretty non-existent. There's no sewage. They probably still had French bulldogs. They stink.

I'm going to tell you, bad smells. Get my dog around, okay? He stinks. He causes the plague. So in London, which is one of the more populated areas of the world, muck rackers were employed to remove the waste. How good is that? You're a muck racker.

Love it. And if that's not the best job title ever, gong farmers were employed to empty open latrines. Gong farmer. What do you farm? Gongs. Shit. Shit.

Jason Statham is. Gong farmer. Dong. They were also clutching its straws with what was spreading the illness. And when cats were blamed, they were killed, like, en masse in some places as possible transmission agents. I agree. In fact... They're still getting close, aren't they?

They're getting close. And cats could get the plague, as could dogs, although it was pretty rare for a dog to get it because their immunity was much higher. Did you come across this, Dave? That I remember, might have been from a Hugh Newark episode, but... Don't lie, this is a Bill Bryson's fact that you're trying to pretend as... They, because they killed all the cats that actually made it worse because the cats would, you know, take out rats. Yes, I did read that. Well, good.

That was his question. Did you come across that? Oh, sorry, I did come across that. So the answer is yes. But I can't remember it was one of those things that said, this is a common myth. Yeah. Right. Okay. Because when I was looking up the cat thing,

because at first I was like, that's awful for the cats they're being blamed, but then later I came across, well, they could technically get the play. Like a lot of animals were getting it. Like not as much as the rats or the humans, but like I think livestock could technically get it as well. So it was pretty, it was killing a lot of creatures. Yeah.

Despite best efforts, the spread and subsequent death toll was frankly unimaginable for us today. Let me try. I've got a great imagination. With numbers? Yep. History today quotes two sources that describe the conditions and it's awful stuff. This is a, am I in charge of grim facts?

Yeah. Great, because I've got a couple coming up for you. Fabulous. No, you're dull facts. I'm grim facts. Oh, yeah, it's grim. So Matt will decide if your facts are grim. Is this grim?

Okay. Because they're not fun. I'm not even going to try and pitch this one to you, I'll zone out. This is a Florentine chronicler relating, and Florence was absolutely smashed by the plague. It was one of the worst places to be living during this time. This is what they wrote about what the conditions were like and how many people were dying. All the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried.

At every church, they dug deep pits down to the water table, and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shoveled it down on top of them. And later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth. Just as one makes lasagna with layers of pasta and cheese. I was thinking a tiramisu. But yeah, that makes more sense.

They make a little, yeah, making a little human lasagna. So, so grim. Where's the bechamel? That's a grim fact for sure. Where's the bechamel? Where's the bechamel? This is not like mumming used to make. I haven't seen it, but is that what the pit, the TV shows about?

Yeah, it's just about a big pit. Really? Yeah. Pretty grim. Right. That does sound grim. But kind of fascinating. What's the big pit about?

Oh, they just throw bodies in. Oh, okay. It's just a live feed. I have heard it's in real time, actually. You just see a body full. Right. Minute for minute. Minute for minute.

It's crazy. That's great. Great show. Next up, the chronicler Agnolo Dutura, known as the fat, relates this from his Tuscan hometown. You know, there's

Eno, the terrible, this is Agnolo the Fat. Oh, that's awesome. What he writes. Father abandoned child, wife, husband, one brother another, for this illness seemed to strike through breath and sight, and so

they died. And no one could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could Without priest, without divine officers, Great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead, And they died by the hundreds, both day and night. And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug. And I, Agnolo de Tura, called the fat,

buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who went for any death, for all awaited death, and so many died that all believed it was the end of the world. This situation continued from May until September. Matt, you reckon that's grim? Yes.

I don't think it's hard to argue against that being grim. That's horrific. It's so in just a few. But remember the fat. Remember who? Yeah, it's a bit of fat. That's pretty fun. He's called the fat.

And he survived to write that down for us. Perfect. Thank you the fat. Do you think he's the fat? You know, they chew the fat. Just means like just talk, gossiping, a bit of chat. Chew the fat. Do you think he was just a good chat?

He was a good chatter? It's that or he was a very slim man. Yeah. You know, it's like one of those. Yeah, like calling a really big guy tiny or something. Yeah. Yeah. Red-headed bluey.

Mm-hmm. You get it. Et cetera. Et cetera. Goal, my uncle's calling me rowdy when I was a kid. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's up.

You were pretty rowdy or? I believe it was an ironic one. It's like how you guys call me... Family things as a teenager and just waited them out sort of thing, I think. Yeah, yeah. You guys call me the ugliest woman in the world. Yeah, it's like it's ironic. Yeah. Ironic.

We call you head, short for hideous. And what you should do with your face. In just a few months. Ironically, Jeff. I was just staring at Malik. Sorry, we're going to get back to the groom stuff here. Yeah. In just a few months, 60% of Florence's population died from the plague

and probably the same proportion in Sienna. Friar John Klin witnessed its effects in Leinster after it spread to Ireland in August 1348. And he writes, That disease entirely stripped Vils, cities, castles and towns of inhabitants of men so that scarcely anyone who would be able to live in them. The plague was so contagious that those touching the dead or even the sick were immediately infected and died.

And the one confessing and the confessor were together led to the grave. Many died from carbuncles and from ulcers and postules that could be seen on shins and under the armpits. Some died as if in a frenzy from pain of the head, others from spitting blood. Awful stuff. according to the BBC, just in England alone, most historians believe that between a third and half of the population were killed by the black death. Fuck.

The population of England at the time of the black death is estimated to have been around 6 million, so that it means approximately 2 to 3 million people died. Thanos would have loved that, wouldn't he? Oh, yeah. Maybe it was Thanos. Maybe he snapped. Was it? You know, it took me so long to realize what the snap.

You know how they'd call it the snap? Dave, I know this. Thanos is a big bad guy from one of the Marvel arcs. Okay. And he did this thing. It was called the snap. And with a click of his fingers, half the Earth's popular. Actually, half the whole universe's populations died on it, all planets and everything.

And they just disappeared. And I just never understood that the snap is because Americans say snap your fingers instead of click your fingers. Oh, they mean click. So he did the click I never He did the click So the snap makes You know

Probably has a bit of a Maybe it's a better sounding Maybe a little snappier in a way Yeah But the click What do you think of that Jess Should have been retarded for our audience

I think so yes Once they just over They overdub Robert Daniel Watch out We have to watch out for The snap Oh sorry The click

The click Just have to dub Dub every time we It's just an Australian saying The snap App. Sorry.

That click. Oh, which one is it? Oh, yeah, they click. They just get Eric Banner. That's click with CK. Not a group of people who don't want anything to do with you. Oh, hang on. I'll give an example.

This sound. I know not everyone's able to do it, but this guy can. And then the freeze frame of Robert Danny Jr. As Iron Man just keeps... Then the movie keeps playing. I got to tell you, that was really fucking done. The Australian cut goes a half an hour long. That's just a man in a voiceover booth has a breakdown.

Starring Eric Banner as The Clickman. He goes, technically I am in the MCU. I think you're fine. I'm a Clickman. The disease did not discriminate. And whilst poor people were more affected than, other elements of society. I think because they were proportionally,

as they often are, most of society. Yes. Leaders and wealthy individuals died on mass too. King Alfonso the 11th of Castile, Queen Eleanor of Portugal, Queen Jean of Burgundy, or Queen Jean of Burgundy.

Princess Joan of England also come to the plague, as did John de Stratford, the Archbishop of Canterbury. John de Ufford, who had been chosen to be the new, Archbishop of Canterbury then died of plague before he was consecrated. The next Archbishop of Canterbury that replaced him was Thomas Brad Wardeen, who died from the plague just 38 days after his appointment.

So three of them died in a very short succession. Finally, Simon Islip was consecrated and he survived. Would you at that point, if you're Simon, would you be sort of like, is this cursed? Do I want to take this? I'm not sure I'm on the right side. Yeah. But he managed to live for a bit. Yes.

That's good. Real poison chalice in a way. Oh, Jess, so chalice is like a goblet. Oh, good. And that's like a cup. Gotcha. Oh, okay.

Yep, thanks. Yeah, great. I think I'm starting to get up cup. So I wanted to see what was going on with the Pope at the time. I'm like, surely a Pope died of this. But no, Pope Clements the 6th. He reigned during the Black Death. He was 1340 out to 1350,

during which he granted remission of sins to all those who died. of the plague. So a lot of people's biggest fear was not that they would die, but that there was no one alive, no priests or anything left to give them last rights and that kind of thing. Right. So they were like, how am I going to get into heaven?

So he just bulk did it. He just went, if you die of plague, you're good. Right. Wow. He's got that level of power. Why don't do that for everyone all the time? Yeah.

Because that would cost jobs. Yeah. For his cronies. For unpaid priests. Yeah. The Pope found that there were so many people. dying that he had to consecrate the entire Rhone River in France and Switzerland so that it could be considered holy ground and the body's thrown into it considered, I guess, blessed or whatever.

Wow. Because like the whole river, so many people were just chucking bodies in. He goes, all right, if your body's in there, you're good. Crazy. One quarter of his own staff and many bishops around him died, but the Pope did not. And I need to note, Pope Clement the 6th is not listed as a sexually active Pope, but Clement the fourth and Clement the seventh are. So a couple of clems.

A couple of sexy clems. Such a sexy name. He was betwixted a couple of active popes. Yeah. But he apparently was able to stay on the straight and narrow. So to speak. Many mass graves have been uncovered in England over the centuries. And despite the obvious horror going on,

the way the bodies are carefully laid side by side suggests bodies were treated respectfully and in a dignified way. Oh, that's good. That's in England. In other places, people died so quickly that proper burial or cremation could not occur. Corpses were thrown into large pits and putrefying bodies lay in their homes and just in the streets. Oh, that's awful. So these stinky places would have been even stinkier.

And remember, they're scared of, like, bad smells. Yeah. There are varying estimates of the death toll. A lot of sources estimate that between 25 million and about 30 million. people died from the black death in Europe, which is 30% of the entire population of Europe, and approximately 33% of the Middle Eastern population. Some sources say that you can add in another 25 million deaths in Asia and Africa as well. My last quote from Professor Ole Benedict Tao.

He believes that unbelievably, most of those death toll estimates are off and need to be higher. He writes, the data is sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely that the black deaths swept away around 60% of Europe's population. It is generally assumed the size of Europe's population at the time was around 80 million. This implies that around 50 million people died in the black death. And he continues, this is a truly mind-boggling statistic. It overshadows the horrors of the Second World War and is twice the number murdered by Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union. As a proportion of population that lost their lives, the black death caused unrivaled mortality.

That's wild. And imagine, like, obviously, it's awful to be killed by this horrific disease. Imagine being someone who survived it. Just, it would be awful. Everything would be terrible. Like, for such a long time afterwards, things are. Your whole life sucks. Yeah, like, if you've just buried five of your children, your partner, all your neighbors are dead, your jobs probably go, like, everything smells terrible. It's awful. Just conditions around you. Everything. My God.

And it's just the same story ever. Half of Paris's population of 100,000 people died. In Italy, like I said, the population of Florence was reduced from between 110 and 120,000 inhabitants in 1338 to just 50,000 in 1351. Florence did not regain its pre-14th century size until the 19th century. Wow. So it took 500 years to get the population back up. People weren't rooting enough. They weren't rooting.

They weren't rooting. At least 60% of the population of Hamburg and Bremen perished, and a similar percentage of Londoners may have died from the disease as well. By 1430, Europe's population was lower than it had been in 1290 and would not recover on the whole to the pre-pending level until the 16th century. Wow. So it took 200 years for Europe to get back to where they were. They were rooting a bit long.

As a whole, a bit more. Yep, that's good. As a whole. A bit more. So there were obvious, as I think you're sort of getting to there, just massive effects on society from this crazy loss of life. A result of the high... I'd almost prefer to die.

But that probably doesn't surprise anybody who listens to this podcast. Oh, God, life sounds awful. It sounds like it'd be really difficult and there'd be a lot of logistics and be a fucking, I'm out. You go in four or five days. It's not bad. Yeah, exactly. It's quick.

I mean, you are probably vomiting blood right up until the end, but still. Yeah, well, as a pretty vomiting girl. Yeah, so I've been through it before. Yeah, I get it. So a result of the high mortality was a shortage of workers, not surprisingly. Crops could not be harvested. Traveling in trade became curtailed, and food and manufactured goods became short. this led to rapid wage rises as landowners had to compete for the remaining workers by paying them more.

The plague broke down the normal divisions between the upper and lower classes and led to the emergence of a new middle class as surviving workers prospered because they could command top dollar and they acquired land and property. Wow. So some positives for some of the very poor people. In 1351, a law in England was introduced to force wages to go back to the level. they had been before the Black Death. This was one of the causes of the famous peasants revolt, a major uprising across large parts of Europe a few decades later in 1381

because people were not happy with that. Sure. Some people were affected more than others. Monks, nuns and priests were especially hard hit since they cared for people ill with the plague. Doctors weren't able to do much for the dying, as I said before, but when doctors started to die, quacks filled their place,

which is funny to compare, you know, those doctors to quacks because all the things they were doing absolutely insane. The quacks came in and said, yeah, a bit of rest, here's some aspirin or something. Oh, look at this. Yeah. I'd probably, you know, take some pound at all.

That'll help the fever. Yeah, bring that down. They're like, oh, yeah, well, now. Just take some of my blood, would you? Just chop him open. Get the leeches for fuck sake. So they started selling useless Q. and amulets and other adornments that claim to offer magical protection.

Hey, hey, hey, I've got many very effective amulets. Thank you very much. God knows how many migraines I'd have if I didn't have my amulets with me. This is a crazy thing. A study performed by Thomas Van Hoof, which is a great name. Very good. That man is a cow. Thomas Van Hoof.

That's a cow in a suit. That's a cow in a suit. Well, what's the name of the guy in? Montreal, Jess, who was running for local council or

some sort of election. Philippe? Snosberg? No. Was it? No. You took a picture.

I did. Philippe. It was. I just love this guy's name so much. No idea about his policies. Felipe. It was,

yeah, Philippe or Felipe. Oh, come on, I took a photo with this guy. Maybe it's one L. Here it is.

Oh, it's Felipe Schnob. Just thought that was such a great name. Philippe Schnob. Filippe Schnob. Big fan of that. I'm also a big fan of Thomas Van Hoof. Yeah, I like Van Hoof more. Van Hoof is from the Utrecht University, suggests that the innumerable deaths brought on by the pandemic, cooled climate by freeing up land and triggering reforestation. That's how many people died. This may have led to what is called the Little Ice Age, a period of

regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region. Another possible reason is that the insane multi-tens of millions death toll from the massacres by the Mongols under Genghis Khan. Okay. So that's about 100 years earlier. So over these time, like, if you add those up together, it's like over 100 million people have died. And they're like, they've, well, cooled the climate. Wow. Isn't that?

That's how many people died. And as if there wasn't already enough death and suffering, people were looking for answers as to why they had been forsaken by the Black Death. and some Europeans targeted, quote, various groups such as Jews, friars, foreigners, beggars, pilgrims, lepers and Romani people, blaming them for the crisis. Lepers and others with skin diseases such as acne or psoriasis were also killed throughout Europe. Oh, my God. But there were various, yeah, pogroms particularly against Jewish people where they were blamed for, quote, unquote, poisoning wells. And they're like, these people have caused it. And, like, there were the horrific massacres across Europe.

And I think, was it the Pope? Yeah, it was the Pope came out and said, I do not condone this. They're clearly dying too. What the fuck? They're also affected by the plague, so it's nothing to do with any, no one's,

no one's cause this to try and stop the, the massacres, but it's, yeah, it was absolutely wild. Others believe the epit. That's fucked. Dave, I'd say that's somehow the grimmest fact so far. Yes, I'm afraid, I think that maybe more people have died

on this episode than any in the history of the podcast before. Though smallpox is quite a lot too. Yeah. Yeah, certainly a little bit higher than your body count, Dave, by about 100%. I don't understand how percentages were. Wow! Wow! Absolutely.

Roasted. I feel a little bit embarrassed by my body counter and it's not 100 million people. Pretty embarrassed. Pretty embarrassing. Pretty embarrassing. So a lot of people understandably saw this as the end of the world. Yeah, I think that is actually understandable. Yeah.

And especially because life expectancy wasn't super old back then anyway, right? So you'll die of natural causes and you'd just be like, well, this is the world. forever and it's fucked. You don't know how good it's going to get in 2026. Eden, how good it's going to be. And how it will be forever. Yeah, like, look at how good this is now. Putting things in context.

They didn't have jeans. Feeling pretty good. That's pretty good. Pretty good. You know what I mean? They didn't have plumbing for fuck sake. I love a shower. Oh, beautiful.

I love to have a shower. We all love a shower. Oh, I love a more. And then combining the two, on in the shower? Oh, my God, that is luxury. That's why I'm really treating myself. Yeah.

You know, like people will talk about having an everything shower. That's what I, for me, that's when I'm wearing everything denim. I'm not having everything shower. An everything shower. Oh, man, you've got to have an everything shower. That's when you do it all. What does that mean? Well, as Dave said, it's when you do it all.

Like wash your hair and stuff? Wash your hair, wash your face. shave your pits I'll probably wash your feet I was gonna say put on a face uh face serum this is a boy

trying to describe it and everything shower probably curl your lashes it's probably what's that does that serum you have Dave? Lochet pochet or whatever

oh la roche-é-po-say what a ridiculous thing ah la Roet-Pay No, that's it wasn't it, wasn't. That's the sunscreen I use every day. Grosho, per se. La Roche, per se. He's close about some of it.

And everything's shower is you wash your hair, your body scrub, you're shaving your legs, you're doing everything. It's a long shower where you're getting everything done. Gotcha. But for me, it's I'm wearing everything denim. Can I get in the shower? You do it more like the bagel.

Everything's bagels. It's just everything on. Yeah. What are you going to put it on me? Yeah, I feel like the way they use, everything shows the opposite, taking hair off your legs and stuff. That's not everything. That's wrong.

That's wrong. That's what that is. So not surprisingly, for something experienced almost universally in large parts of the planet, the Black Death had an immense and lasting effect on popular culture and art, including the dance macabre, also known as the Dance of Death, is an artistic genre of allegory from the late Middle Ages on the universality of death come plague time. You'll probably see, if I showed you a photo of it,

it consists of the personified death leading a row of dancing figures from all walks of life to the grave, and they're all skeletons. Oh. It's typically with an emperor king. Yes, that does ring a bell. Munk, a youngster, beautiful girl, all in skeleton state, And they were produced under the impact of the Black Death,

reminding people of how fragile their lives were. Can you read that list again and we'll decide which ones we are? Okay, we've got Emperor or King. Let's say that's one. Okay. Pope, monk. You're the monk. Youngster.

Or the youngster. That's you. Beautiful girl. Yep. There he is. Matt, you're the beautiful girl. There's our beautiful girl. Oh, and skeletons.

I reckon that you're properly Pope, Jess. A cute corpse. Yep, you're a cute little corpse. Yeah, I look good in white. That's not true. I don't actually. It's not a colour that suits me. It doesn't...

Why doesn't suit you? No, black doesn't suit me either. So this is sort of... I'm just showing Jess an image of the dance macabre. Oh! There's sort of skeletons all parading around together, getting in and out of the grave.

Yeah, okay. They look like we're having a good time. It looks fun, but that's sort of like imagery that's... You look another black and white one? Yeah. That's the one I'm so familiar with, yeah. Sort of famously associated with the Black Death... From the Nuremberg Chronicle.

Matt, being so old, you see in color or is it still black and white for you? I actually see in sepia. Yeah, I got upgraded. Yeah, right. Oh, that'd be nice, yeah. Yeah. It's like black and white and the sort of yellow.

And brown. Yellowed. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's painted over the top. That's vivid, which to me is vivid. I remember the day that they switched things over from black and white to sepia. Oh, man, it was like technicolor.

The day they switched over to vivid yellow and brown. To put it in a term you understand. I made myself laugh there. Apologies. Don't ever apologise. Somebody has to find you funny. No, I don't think anyone has to. No, somebody has to.

Somebody must. Okay, well, all right. And I've drawn the shorts, short, I guess. Also coming out of this period is the DeSameron. Is what I'm saying the right? Does it sound... De Cameron. De Cameron.

Look at it. De Cameron. De Cameron, Dias. It's DeCathlon. It's a collection of short stories by the 14th century Italian author Giovanni Baccio. The book is structured as a frame story containing a hundred tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men as they shelter in a secluded villa just outside Florence in order to escape the black death, which was afflicting the city. and that's one of the more famous works out of Italy from this time period.

Women during and after the Black Death also benefited from the, or they benefited, I should say, from the growing importance of vernacular literature because a broader cultural forum became available to them which had previously been restricted to men by the Latin Church. But I guess so many people are dying. They're like, fine, let some women in. And so they began writing and fostering.

through patronage and translations of others. For example, in France, Christine de Pizan, who lived until 1430, became the first woman in Europe to support herself by writing. Wow. So there's some positives here. Yeah. Yeah, the girls. Woo! If you can manage to live, maybe you'll learn to read and write.

Then I've got to the Plague Mythbusters section of the show. Oh. You might... If I say a plague doctor costume, does that anything come to mind for that? Yes, because of the walking tour I went on. Oh. Is it like a birdhead? Yeah, the birdhead.

Like a long nose crow type thing and the big hat. So an image associated with the Black Death is that of the plague doctor wearing a beaked mask, ankle length, waxed overcoat, gloves, boots, white-brimmed hat, linen hood and overcoat. And while some plague doctors did wear masks, the beak image actually dates to the the 17th century and plague doxes of the time didn't actually dress like this. Busted! It's a great look though. It's very cool.

It's a very powerful look. It's like Vikings with horns. Yeah. That's not what happened, but it's kind of, it's cooler. It's cool. Matt, you've been looking for a new look. Would you consider the plague doctor look? Oh, plague doctor, yes.

Beaky. Yeah, I think you're beaky, not horny. Hmm. It's two types of people. That's just... Yeah. I like it. In my head, I can't picture right now. I'm picturing the spy versus spy comic. Is it vaguely like that?

Yeah, yeah. I'd say it's like that because that's a hatted, beat animal. Right, okay. It's a bit steampunky. In a coat. Which I think is super cool. Yeah, I'm in. That could be your new look, I think. Yeah, fantastic. Just as a suggestion.

I accept it. Great. I'm in. Great. Look forward to seeing that look next week. Here's one that I always thought about. Ring around the Rosie, also known as Ring a Ringer Roses, amongst other variations. It's a popular folk song and nursery rhyme.

And I'd always heard that this was about the play. You heard that? I have heard that. With some of the lyrics being, because there's many versions worldwide, it turns out. But ring around the Rosie, and that's saying, people say that means a red circular rash on the skin, pocket full of posies and that means sweet-smelling herbs people carry to block bad smells and stop disease

and then ashes are ashes or a tissue a tissue sneezing or the burning of dead bodies and we all fall down dropping dead from the illness but it turns out that this interpretation only dates back to the 1950s or 60s relatively recently really that's really reason

because often those old nursery rhymes and kids jingles and stuff go back like a crazy amount of time. Yeah. And so, I mean, so, well, the, the song of the nursery rhyme as a folk song, that does go back a lot later, but just people saying, oh, that, you know, that's about the plague is only about, you know, 60 or 70 years old.

According to the ABC, that's the Australian one, the nursery rhyme was first written down in Kate Greenaway's 1881 edition of Mother Goose, but it had, you know, sort of folk origins before that. And at the time, ideas about its origin pointed to pagan beginnings. I see. So, but I always thought, you know, people would say, hey, you know, this one's about the plague. Yeah. Kids are dancing to the plague song.

And you go, huh. Yeah, and there's another one. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, supposedly about Queen Mary or maybe, yeah, I think Queen Mary. Bloody Mary? That may also be a myth. Yeah, I think so. Maybe also a myth. Maybe.

I thought Matt was going to come and be like, that is a myth, but you're not sure, but it could be. Yeah, I mean, anything could be, I guess.

That'd be the best. I wasn't there. I'm taking someone's word for it. Mythbusters always said, well, it could be a myth. Anything could be, couldn't it?

What do you reckon? Should we just blow up a car? Join us next week. See ya. I don't know. Why are you asking me? I'm just some guy. I don't know anything.

I don't know. I don't care. I don't care anymore. Come on. Can we all just live our lives? Who gets us? Who gets it? Yeah, just calm down.

So the Black Death is usually listed as lasting from about 1346 to 1353, with the peak of the wave subsiding in Europe in 1351. But it turns out that really the Black Death was not one pandemic, but centuries of outbreaks. It just kept coming back. Great. Being introduced into Europe multiple times, and there were recurrences of the plague in, remember people saying it's over in 1353, recurred in 1361 to 63,

1369 to 71, 1374 to 75, 1390, and 1,400. Wow. So it just kept coming back. But not, sorry, not to like the same numbers, No, because I think they started getting a bit of immunity because everyone had happened.

Yeah, wow. Like if you'd lived through it and also, you know, they were getting better, slightly better at quarantining and stuff like that. And not just putting their shit in the street? Yeah, because of my asthma. Yeah, because of the smell. According to Catherine A. Glatter and Paul Finkelman, the plague died out by the century's end,

but outbreaks resurfaced and spread throughout Europe over the next 400 years. In 1656-57, two-thirds of the population in Naples and Genoa died from the disease. In 1665-66, just before the Great Fire that we spoke about on last year's block, London lost about one quarter of its citizens to plague, which is about 100,000 people. And got a little side anecdote that someone suggested when I was looking at plague in the hat, or maybe a couple of people. And one village in England is famous for stepping up to prevent the disease in this outbreak in 1665. That is the remote village of Eam in Derbyshire, partway between Manchester and Sheffield.

So in 1665, a bale of cloth arrived from London where thousands had already died from the plague at this point. Contained in the bale of damp cloth with fleas carrying the plague. A tailor's assistant named George Vickers dried the cloth in front of the fire And unwittingly stirred the disease-ridden fleas contained within the pencil Of course because they love the warm They love a tropical holiday

Oh, where are we? Oh, gorgeous. Oh, gorgeous Eam! Oh, Charlie! What's anyone got a pin of Carolina for Eam? Oh, good for my swimmers. My swimmer's all. There's any pebble beaches around.

I'd love to go for a swim here with Eam and lovely landlocked Eam. I love a beautiful tropical holiday name. Dave, that's just silly. That's silly. Oh, Jet 2 give away, go get away to Eam. George Bickin is they've got all the pus. That's for them.

That's where they swim, I guess. Oh, should we travel down the body? You know? It's one of the postules or whatever they are. Oh, we've got here, yeah. Oh, I found a nice little warm armpit over here. Gorgeous. There's an egg in here.

And they said, what size egg is it? You're welcome to egg. Is that I remember of a Winselberg? Welcome to Egg? Some of her. That sounds like the nonsense they were doing in the 70s. Welcome to egg. Welcome to egg.

And there's just the trumpet going, B, but, but, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo. Oh. Man, that's, what is that, that's a banger? That is a great song. That's, that's off ram. That is off ram. That is, uh, Admiral.

Admiral, what's his name? Anyway. That is actually. Man, that's a bangers, so hands across the water. By the way, uh, there's no, there is theories of Mary Mary quite contrary about Queen Mary or maybe Mary Queen of Scots, but there's, it's disputed. And there's no proof that it goes back as far as them. So it's a myth.

First printed in 1744, probably. But anything could be. Anything could be a myth. It could be. And let me just check this egg before we move on, and I'd derail you later. It's not welcome to egg. But it's, I mean, it's no less ridiculous. The album was called Back to the Egg.

What's the fought? Amazingly, final. album by wings. Wow. Well, yeah, they peaked it. The band, the Beatles could have been. Back to the egg. Back of the egg.

All right, so back to Eam. George Vickers, he's got the cloth there. He's drying it out in front of the fire. He was the first inhabitant of the village to die from the Black Death. He got him first. The pestilence swept through the community and between September and December 1665, 42 villages died and remember it was a very small place. and by the spring of 1666, many were on the verge of fleeing their homes and livelihoods to save themselves.

The village's newly appointed rector, William Momperson, stepped up and announced that he thought all the residents of Eam, even those not showing signs of infection, should quarantine themselves to stop the spread to the nearby towns of Sheffield and Bakewell. The problem was that the new rector, William Mopperson, was not popular in the town. You see, the old rector Thomas Stanley, who was born. popular had been removed as he in the whole town had been supporters of Oliver Cromwell, the guy that in very simple terms had cut off the head of King Charles I and rules as Lord protectorate for a bit. But after that, after he died, King Charles II was able to come back

to power. And this old rector had been removed for refusing to use the book of common prayer introduced by Charles II in religious services. So the town of Eam were pretty suss on their their guy's replacement. But Momperson reached out to the man he had replaced Thomas Stanley and together they convinced the town that the right thing to do was to quarantine themselves. According to the BBC, Momperson said that if they agreed to stay, effectively choosing death for many of them, he would do everything in his power to alleviate their suffering and remain with them, telling them that he was willing to sacrifice his own life rather than see nearby

communities decimated. The villages, even the reluctant ones, agreed to the plan. and it was remarkably effective at stopping the spread. However, it did mean the plague ripped through the little village. August 1666 saw the highest number of victims, reaching a peak of five or six deaths a day. The weather was remarkably hot that summer, which meant that fleas were more active, and the mortality rate was even greater than in London where the disease had spread from. The BBC writes,

The same month, resident Elizabeth Hancock, buried six of her children and her husband close to the family farm and they'd all perished in just eight days. Fucking hell. So horrific times. In just over a year, 260 of the village's inhabitants had died and it was possible the village had as few as 350 to begin with.

Although it was, I've read other estimates that it could have been up to 850 people. Right, okay. But still, not a big place. A lot of people, and you would know everyone there and a lot of people died. As for Rector Momperson, who was his idea to quarantine,

them and it probably saved a lot of lives by not spreading it. He devised the plan. He miraculously survived the outbreak when he left Eam a few years later in 1669 to work in Eekring Nottinghamshire. Such was the reputation of the quote plague village. He was forced to live in a hut in Rufford Park until the residence fears had abated. So like he had this reputation that carried forward. Even though he's, you know, a bit of a hero really.

Yeah. They're like, you're the plague guy. Yeah. Stay away. They didn't understand what he'd actually done. And the fact that he survived it meant that he definitely doesn't have it. Yeah, that's right. He's been there for years looking after sick and dying people, yeah.

The thing that I feel like it's so sad and it's brutal, but one cool thing is that everyone was pretty much very religious back then, right? They were believed in heaven and stuff. So you'd be like, talking like Jess saying, You either get left behind with this carnage or you go to paradise forever. Yeah. I'm happy to get to heaven a little early. Yeah, that's right.

This is like a hell on earth and that's a heaven on heaven. Yeah. Let's go there. I'm going to heaven. Double heaven. I want to go straight to double heaven if that's okay. Double heaven. So just to finish up, the plays kept on rolling.

100,000 people died in Vienna in 1679. Moscow recorded more than 100,000 plague deaths during 177071. It wasn't until the works of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in the 1800s that it was discovered, germs are the cause of disease. The plague bacteria was finally discovered by Alexander Yersen in 1894, also Japanese physician Gidissato Shibar Suburo, was separately coming to a similar conclusion at the same time, if not a few days earlier, and they were rivals.

Wow. Wow. The bacteria was eventually named after Yersin called Yersinia Pestis, as I said at the start of the episode. Yersen is also the co-discoverer of both the diphtheria and tetanus toxins. Do you want it to be named after you? Yeah, this thing that is killed literally tens, if not hundreds of millions of people over the century. It's one of the worst things that humans have seen and you're like, and it's named after me.

Yeah, his rival's like, damn. Sure. Oh, that should have been me. But then his rival gets the, like, the vaccine named after him or something. That'd be good. That'd be good. Like a medicine that saves a lot of lives. I'm okay with that.

But just being like this thing. This germ. This germ that flees vomit into people. That killed so many people. That's named after me. Isn't it? It's amazing. Do you think Louis Pastor knew when he discovered germs or whatever that he helped create one of the great jokes

when people in the old and dies would say, hey, ladies and germs. Ladies and germs. Ladies and germs? I don't know if that was ever a real thing or if that was just a parody thing. Because it's not even close to gentlemen.

No, it doesn't work at all. Hey, ladies and germs. Welcome, ladies and bags of shit. Jordan. Like, okay What? You're talking to me? What?

Am I a bag of shit? The MC tonight is a badass. Everyone who's not a laser bag, a big old sticky bag of shit. Okay. Did you ever like a primacy or teacher or something say Ladles and Jelly Spoons? Oh my God, yes.

That's also not close at all. It's really not. Ladles is close to ladies, I guess. Kind of. Jelly spoons? Gentleman? Jelly spoons. Ladies and jettles.

Jellels. Jellyspoon. Is that my saying like... A jelly spoon's even a thing? Yeah. I guess that's sprints for jelly. Okay. You know when you go to a fancy restaurant and they have like the salad fork and the soup spoon and the jelly spoon? Yeah, you go outside in.

You start with a jelly. You get it a salad. And then there's another jelly spoon on the inside. You end on a jelly as well. Double jelly. You start an end of jelly. The jelly spoon I can remember is the Pizza Hut all you can eat. And the dessert station.

Oh, yeah. You spoon out those. cubes of jelly. Make your own frog in a pond. Equally clousy. Yes. So it's finally named... You got the frog tongs and you got the jelly spoon.

Flotons and frogs tongs. Facts happened. I'm so close to the end here. All right. Let's do it then. So it was finally named after Yersen, the Yersinia pestis. But even then, after it was discovered, like the isolated said, this is what causes it, even then the last pandemic at the end of the 1800 spread across Asia and at last gave scientific

medicine the opportunity to identify the cause of the disease and its mean of transmission of transmissions they found out was rats and fleas however an estimated in this absolutely blew my mind because I had no idea about it 12 million people died from the plague in India between 1898 and 1918 Wow 12 million that recently as well just that recently wow I didn't know that I though. Russian-born bacteriologist Vladimir Hafkeen developed a vaccine that he first tested on himself in 1896. And according to the UK Science Museum,

there were some side effects from the vaccine and incomplete protection, but the risk of contracting bubonic plague was reduced by 50% by 1900. Over 4 million people had been inoculated. Wow. So that did save a few people, but I couldn't believe that many people died in India.

Like you said, not that long ago. And plague still occurs in the modern day. Like, it's just something in Australia we don't even think about. Yeah, bloody, he's a bloody plague over here, man. Plague on my life. Oh. She's pointing to me. You pointing to me?

Oh. Why? Me? No. Oh. Oh. I'm a good one. Oh, no.

It's the clique. According to the World Health Organization, the WHO, between 2019 and 2025, 10 countries reported suspected human plague cases to the WHO, six of which reported confirmed cases. Overall, there were 3,847 suspected cases and 423 deaths corresponding to a fatality rate of 11%. So it's still pretty high. Shit.

Most cases were reported from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar in Africa, in Africa, where plague remains endemic in some areas. if you were to get plague today and had access to good medical care and healthcare providers, which sadly not everyone in the Congo or Madagascar do, they would treat the plague just using powerful prescription antibiotics, which can cure the infection completely if given early enough. Right, wow. So that's good news if you get it today.

Yeah. And just to finish, modern science is amazing, again from the UK Science Museum. Using techniques such as genome mapping, scientists have been able to identify the exact strains of bubonic plague that they encounter and their origins, making it much easier to track the spread of epidemics today. Wow. But that's my report on the plague or the black death,

which went for a lot longer and killed a lot more people than even I knew. Like, I knew it was bad. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But it is like kind of unbelievable that society at all was able to get through that. Absolutely. And the economy. But yeah, I guess I hadn't really thought about I thought about like, oh, it's an awful death and how it spreads, but I hadn't really thought about the conditions people would be living in

and then like, yeah, the people who lived, how awful. You have to keep going, yeah. Crazy. What a story. Yeah, I just think of it. I mean, constant fear, no real idea of how people are getting it. Yeah. Yes.

It would just be such a stressful time. Yeah. Yeah, it didn't have the understanding of how diseases spread. So, yeah, you'd be, people are coming up with all these theories and you'd be believing them and, yeah. I think the fact it keeps coming back so you would be on edge all the time. Yeah. And doing things that you think are helping that are probably making it worse or, yeah, crazy stuff. And I get, I mean, we obviously not quite the same, but we lived through a milder version of it.

Obviously, with COVID. I remember early on, people weren't really sure how it was spreading. and didn't realize that being outside meant you were relatively safe. It spreads more insurers and stuff. I'm not a scientist, I should say. But I was thinking about this the other day. I remember making sure I didn't push that, you know, to cross the road, the button you push to cross the road.

I remember using my elbow on that, like, could catch COVID off a bit of metal. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I've got to wear gloves to the shops. Yeah, yeah. But that's, yeah, I did a lot of bloodletting and I got through it. Way, it worked. Well, you did bloodletting on other people. Yes.

I was full on. I said, I've got magic blood. Take it. Take it. I'll save you. I'll save you. I'll have to go around. Oh, I'm okay, thanks.

No, no, no, no, here it is. Let me ring some into you. I'm bringing it out of rags. They need to go around. I'll soak this all night. Just rag. My body keeps making it. I can't stop.

I can't stop this gift. I don't know how to start it, but it won't stop. He's got heaps of this shit. Look at it. It's like, you know, if you're drilling for oil and you get lucky, I can't miss. Everywhere I puncture myself, I'm hitting red gold.

Blood. Texas T. Texas B. That's my blood time. Texas B. I'm Texas B. Texas B positive. That's also my attitude.

That was just nonsense. Hey, Dave, that was really great. What a, I mean, what a huge topic. And this is certainly what I had in mind when we started Blocktober all those years ago. These huge topics that everyone knows by name, but possibly don't know many of the details. Absolutely. So this was, yeah, one of the most voted for topics of the year.

And as we heard before, a lot of people suggested it. And Dave, I think you did a beautiful job there. Thank you so much. And here's some of our blood. Thank you. What a gift. Matt and I have taken a collection. That's one brother of us.

Yes. We've mixed our bloods together. An amulet with our mixed up blood. Would you like that as a gift? Thank you, please. If we gave you a little, you. yeah, a little amulatory around your neck that had a mix of Matt and my blood in it.

Would that be nice? I love that. Matt, yeah, our blood and Billy Bob Thornton's. Yeah. To remember him and Angela Jolie wore things with each other's blood. To give you context for that very good riff. Dave, it was so great. But would you mind if we dedicate the rest of this episode

to some of our fantastic Patreon supporters? I would actually love nothing more. Nothing more. Okay. Fantastic. Because, yeah, I'm glad you've okayed because this is everyone's favorite section of the show as far as I know. And in this part of the show, we do spend a little time showing our love and appreciation for the great patron supporters without them. This show would not exist.

Certainly wouldn't have been gone for 10 years or whatever we've been doing, which is, blows us away, I think, whenever we think about it. Technically longer than the Black Death, pretty good. Well, hey, are we longer than the Beatles yet? Oh, got to be getting close. They were only like 10 years or something, aren't they? Those. Certainly with the classic lineup where we're longer than they were, you know, once Ringo joined, I'm pretty sure. But the next thing we were to go for is taking down the, what was their...

Queen Elizabeth's rain, yeah. You're right. Okay, yeah. That's the next goal. That's the next goal. These are all early episodes. That makes sense. That's a good one.

So, and her reign is ongoing, of course, if you're talking about Lizzie too. But one day she'll stop, unfortunately, and then we'll keep going. Nah, no, no, she's like my blood. She'll spurt forever. Now, we have a website. It's called Patreon.com. Such a Tugon Pod. You can sign up on a bunch of different levels.

You get all sorts of rewards for your support, including four bonus episodes a month. We've got a back catalogue of about 300 you get access to. You also can get ad-free feeds. You get the video episodes for most of them when we're able to record them like this one in particular. And access to the Facebook group, which is a beautiful community. We're so cool traveling around Canada and meeting so many patrons. I'm up in Brisbane at the moment. And I've been meeting a few, had a few drinks last night with a man.

And a Coup, a couple of Patrions. I think Coop's a patron. Otherwise, I regret spending any time with her. A waste of an hour. Great. A bit of fun there. Kieran was there. I mean, just the loveliest people.

Oh, by the way, I'm in Brisbane. I'm about to record an episode of Hot Trivia Time Machine, which is a new podcast that Quizmises are putting out Dave's old workplace. And you also, Matt, you were a trivia host there too. That's true. Yeah, so the idea of it is you go back through an old, they do a pub trivia, you know, all around Australia. Apparently they've started doing him in New York as well. So I'm going to do an old pub trivia and I've got to do the trivia and then guess what week that trivia came out, month and year sort of thing.

That's awesome. Hot trivia time machine. But before, before I think. talk myself in a term anymore, nots. We've got to thank some Patrions. People on the Sydney-Shaunberg level or above get to give us a fact-quote or question in this section of the show, which actually has a jingle, I think, is something like this. Fact quote or question. He always remembers the ding. She always remembers the sing. Now, the way this works is people on the Sydney-Shanberg level or above get to give us a fact, a quote, or a question, or brag or a suggestion,

or really, whatever they like. They also get to give them. themselves a title. I'm going to read out three this week. First one comes from a person who calls himself Bob McBobbobbibbibbbington. And they have given themselves the title Mr. Bob of the potato people of whole nine. Okay. Under fact quote a question, Bob has listed Ramble. Okay. Man after my own heart. Writing, I recently saw Tim Thames in a year. UK supermarket, so thought I'd try them. I haven't had a penguin bar in a while to truly compare, though others with me had more recently. The verdict from everyone was varying degrees of timetams are better. So I guess there has been one benefit from Brexit for people in the UK. Give me a moment

while I stop crying about all the issues. Nwope, still crying, hold on. I'll get a hold of myself in a mo. Almost there. Hey, feel you feelings? Yep. Right. Right. The other thing is, I'm on boat. I'm on boat.

I'm on boat. I love canal boats I do. Canal? Canal? Yep. Canal. Yeah. I love canal boats I do.

I'm realizing Bob's English. I'll just read it as he's written it. Thank you. I love canal boats I do. And we'll be sad to hand it back. tomorrow. It couldn't get out to international waters so those plastic bathtub ones do have advantages. But these 20 tonne steel boats have to be very careful if those things are around so they don't crumple them like a modern drinks can on a rugby player's head.

Rumble over. Tootle Pip. Tuttle Pip. Tootip. I've never had a penguin. But I mean, Temtam's great. I'd love to have a penguin as a change. But once you go to a double-coat Tim-Tam, you'll never go back. That's right. Is there a double-coat penguin?

Probably not. I've had a single-coat penguin. I remember thinking, this is okay. Yeah, it's fine. It's not a Tim-Tam. I think Tim Tams are better. And I'm glad that you can experience them now. Brexit has loved the thought that being part of the European Union

was what was stopping Tim Tams getting to you. That's your real deal. Yeah, because, Isn't Australia in the European Union? We're in Eurovision? Yeah, we're in the Eurovision Union. Yeah, so we're part of Europe. Thank you so much, Bob.

The next one comes from Matt Chaput, or Chaput, aka Toronto Tipple Tour Guide. Oh, this feels like this might be coming in a little late. Under fact, quite a question, Matt has written Pub Crawl writing, Upgraded my membership as a thank you to Dave for give me a ride to the stand-up comedy at the other boardroom in Toronto.

This is Matt. What a legend. Oh, what a guy. So, I don't know, does Matt go into the context there or should I explain? Um, no, I don't think he does go into the context. Okay, so he just says, this is too late to be useful now, but hopefully I can show you some cool breweries in Toronto next time you're here.

Oh, that's nice. And then he lists a few, but you give context first, and I'll give his tips. So Matt was a lovely fellow I met. We did our two podcasts back to back at the Royal Theatre in Toronto, and then later that night, me, Matt and Alastair were doing a stand-up show at a place called The Boardroom Comedy Club. And then it turns out that me and half the audience went to the wrong boardroom comedy club

because there's two. And these are weed-friendly, like, establishments. So it's funny to be giving people who are predisposed to a little bit of the good stuff, two possible locations to go to. And by the time I got there, the gig was supposed to start at 7, and I was running late, and I got there bang on 7,

and I walk up to the door, and it's locked. I was like, that's weird. I looked it up, oh, I'm in the wrong one. I've got to get an Uber to get there quickly. And as I'm waiting there,

this nice guy, Matt comes up and goes, good-day, Dave. And I was like, oh, hi. And I was like, Evie knows me, you must be from last. I said, did you, are you going to see the comedy show? He goes, yeah.

I was like, we are in the wrong spot. Come with me. We jumped in the Uber together and just made it in time for the show. And he was such a nice guy. Oh, that's awesome. Oh, well, that's cool. And now he's on the Schaumburg level. Now he snagged him.

Welcome, Matt. Thanks, Matt. Now, this is what he writes. There are many, many breweries in Toronto, but some especially good ones in my part of the city, the beaches, are Rawshack Brewing, which has some of the best pizza in the city. So we'll start there to get some food in. They can get really experimental with their beers. One time they made a spaghetti-flavored beer.

Okay. Little bits of basil floating in it. Okay. I like those two or three things. I try it. Yeah, that's a hectic way to kick off things. And next up, black lab brewing lets people bring their dogs in. Black labs where the Black Plague was created.

Yeah, that's right. in. What was the lab supposedly COVID was built in? What city was that? Oh, Wuhan. Wuhan. That's what I would have said if I, if the word came to me. Anyway, one time I, this is what Matt writes,

one time I apologize to the bartender for spilling a beer and he said, this place is full of dogs. If that's the only yellow liquid I have to deal with today, I'll be happy. That's not bad. Yeah, that's a good point. Then Godspeed combines Czech and Japanese brewing traditions. They have a great Yuzu beer. Then left field is a baseball themed brewery with a big antique scoreboard behind the bar.

Oh man, this sounds like a great pub bowl. That sounds fun. And then finally, eastbound Aveling and Radical Road are good too. But this is getting too long. At the end, we can cab over to Blood Brothers brewery and have a delicious cookies and cream stout for breakfast. Oh man, cookies and cream stout sounds delicious. Matt says, love the pod, love the shows, hope you come back soon.

Oh, thank you very much, Matt. Thanks, Matt. And if we could, I could add one more stop, maybe then we'd take an Uber or a cab to the Borderoom Comedy Club, light up whatever they've got behind the counter there, and that'll be the night. Some more of that good stuff, though. The good stuff. Yeah, some of the good stuff, though.

This fucking guy. I like your paws while you try to, you're like, how do I put this? We'd, um, oh, light up a doofy. Sorry, I was just checking that my wire was working. AJ is listening. The funny thing is AJ listening and editing is like, oh, yeah, that is some of the good stuff. Nods off, forgets to edit out all the bad riffs. Comes back to at this point.

Just stop saying the bad riffs. Come on, Jess, be realistic. I don't know it. If I stop the bad riffs, I'll also stop the few good riffs. That's true. That's true. Nothing's worth that. No.

Thank you, Matt. And the last one comes from Jordan Nassie, aka owner of limbs, who is offering us a fact. I just listened to Y'all's Angels episode. With the call and response, oh, okay, I'm like, Angels episode. Yes, the band of the Angels. With the call and response of am I ever going to see your face again? No way, get fucked, fuck off.

Here in Canada and maybe other places, we have one for Billy Idol's Money Money. Was it Moni, moni? Which is, hey, motherfucker, get laid, get fucked. I learned this from my mother and aunt while at a cousin's wedding. And you say it in the gaps that are long enough to say it. Is that a monie, monie. Is that that song? I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe if I heard it, I'd recognise that. But what's the phrase again that we're yelling out? Hey, motherfucker, get laid, get fucked. It's very similar. That's great. At your cousin's wedding, what an education from your mom and are. Actually, I think that one's more positive.

Hey, motherfucker, get laid, get fucked. Whereas we're saying, no way, get fucked, fuck off. Yeah. That's a bit more aggressive. Love to hear it. Yeah. Don't you think this is Canada versus Australia in a nutshell? Absolutely.

We're very aggressive and hostile. A mash-up of those two songs would be awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much, Jordan, for bringing that to our attention. I reckon you'll know that song if it's the one I'm thinking about. I almost thought it was a cover of like an old-timey song. It's got that sort of vibe of early rock and roll. Nice.

Anywho, thank you so much, Jordan, Matt and Bob. The next thing we like to do is shout out to some of our. more recent, Patrons. Jess normally comes up with a game based on the topic. Do you have one today? Which kind of plagued killed them? Oh, okay. Okay.

All right, now, can I put this to you? I'll do the names and places. Yep. Dave does a colour and you do the second half, Bob. Okay. So, like, Dave would do black. No, I got it. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Don't ban on this. There's not that many colors. I've got it. Whoa, whoa. Yeah. Black's already gone. Yeah. Fucking out.

What's left? Ready to go. Got to get the chart up here. Come up, let's go. I'm ready. All right. First up from Ellensburg in Washington in the United States. Thank you so much for your support.

Michael Garcia. Michael Garcia is part of the sage. Plague. Really? Garcia is such a good surname. Jess can talk us through the symptoms. Maybe. Well, the sage plague, it's a very green phleg.

Yeah. Really green. Like a sage or like electric green? No, it's more of a sage. So you sort of go, is that green? What is it? And then your nuts explode. Really?

Yep. Sage Flam, the sixth humour. I'd also love to thank from Ascot Park in South Australia, Zali Grace. Zali Grace is suffering, I'm afraid to say, from the violet. Plague. Okay, symptoms include. Symptoms include. purple phlegm.

Really? Oh my God. Can I just, can we pause this for a second? I just got to know, Jess, where do you get your ideas? I just need, I just need everyone to know. I'm sitting directly next to just, I can see a computer. There is no random generator open here. It's incredible.

All off the dome. This is from the dome. Yep. Actually, hang on, there is a word doc open here and it just says in size 56 font, the word plague. Next up from address and own We're assuming from deep within the fortress of the moles We'll say to any of the mole people

If you want your Christmas card Or any other listeners Sign up by the end of October I think is when we normally do it Start of November On the shoutout level or above To get your Christmas card But you also have to obviously

Have your address logged in On your Patreon account No pressure But if you're on a Christmas card We'll obviously need your address. We'll say from past experience, apparently you can't do it on the app. You've got to do it on the website on Patreon in the back end. You've got to check your details.

First of all, up to date. We don't want to send it to your old address. And I think you have to click the thing, receive gifts or receive something like where we get your address. So make sure that that's all up to date and ticked. If you want it. And we've just got the artwork this year and it's so good. Yeah, can't wait for people to see it. Very exciting.

So from The Fortress of the Moles, thank you so much. Ian Brady. Ian Brady is suffering from the grey mole. Plague. Oh, gosh, that sounds like a nasty one. What's Ian, what's Ian going through? Yeah, your quads swell up real big. Really?

Yeah. I wouldn't mind. I wouldn't mind that. Mine are quite small. And then they explode. Oh. But there would be a point where you're like, this is pretty good, actually. I look great.

I look swall. Yeah. And then you're the next thing. I'm in Brisbane. Right up here in rugby league country, the quads are popping. Oh, you're in Quad City. I'm a bit worried that everyone's got the grey mile plague up here. Yeah, I'd be careful.

Also, from Address Unknown, shooing once again deep within the fortress of the malls, they're really undercover because their name is just down as the letter A. But looking at their email address, I don't think I'm giving too much away saying their name is Alice. Cername starts with L. Okay. Well, A is suffering from the fluoro pink. Plague. Oh, really?

Yeah. Gosh. I thought you're going to do the old rule of four. What's A got? Um, A's, well, your eyes, instead of being like a bit red, they go fluoro pink. Oh, my God. It actually looks kind of cool. Okay.

Yeah. And then they explode. So for a bit it's pretty cool. Yeah, you look awesome. Then your eyes explode. Worth it. Finally this week, one more from the Moleville. Please welcome into this section of the show where I'm going to thank them.

And thank you, Ruben. Ruben is suffering from the turquoise. Plague. Wow. And that's actually just you poop turquoise for a bit. Really? And then you get better. What is turquoise?

Is that a rock or a colour? Both. Both. There's a bluey green. Whoa. And you pooed bluey green. Yep. No, like turquoise.

Stones of turquoise. Oh, that sounds painful. They're little. You get better. And then you get better. Great. And then you've got some beautiful turquoise. Yeah.

Make gorgeous jewelry. Sell it at a market. Yeah. You know. Not all plagues are bad. Not all plagues are bad. Yeah. You point to that and say that's one of mine.

That's an original. Thanks so much to Ruben, Alice, Ian, Zali and Michael, your support is keeping the mics on. And the last thing we need to do this week, there's no triple triptage club inductees, but there are four triptage club inductees. Jess, what is the triptage club? Triptage club are people that have supported the pod over on Patreon for three consecutive years. We welcome them into this exclusive club once you're in, you can't leave, But why would you want to?

Because we have everything you could possibly need. We've got a fully stocked kitchen and bar. Dave books a band. Matt welcomes you in by ticking your name off a list. And he's very charming. And, yeah, we've got toilets and ice hockey and air hockey. We've got a fair bit of hockey. We're hockey mad.

And behind the... That was before we went to Canada. That's right. And then we didn't even get to see any hockey. Behind the bar this week I am serving I've popped some postules

Oh we're having some Postules Yep Popped postules Yep And what do they look like That's just a warm cup of pus Oh right

Are they like in shot glasses Oh No Jess It's almost like sometimes it's always too easy Oh It's awful Yeah You know

There's a family somewhere sitting down to listen to their weekly episode of Do Go On. Around the wild. And they've started, and they've started two hours in? Yeah. Yes. Well, that's dumb. And they're a family of dummies.

I mean, minutes ago someone was pulling turquoise. Yeah, I don't know why that was in as pull on. Yeah. Well, and Dave, you book a band. Oh, my gosh. You're never going to believe it. You are never going to. I was trying to get these guys last block.

Yeah. And they said, actually, sorry, we're just. forming. We need a bit more practice. So I said, don't worry, hit you up next block. And this is obviously well before this topic was announced or given to me. This week, we are being joined by Black Death. Whoa.

An American band that has been noted as the first all African American heavy metal band formed in 1977 in Cleveland, Ohio. Wow. And we got them. We got them. We got them. That's huge. We got them.

That's awesome. So good. Well, hang around for that. If you hear your name. come on in. Dave's up on stage. He will be hyping the crowd up. And the way he does, it's really unique. He does weak word play based on either your name or where you're from. I'm going to show past down your throat. And really, really, sorry, Jess is having a private conversation. Jessica, you get off the phone.

Now, I don't think you shouldn't speak to your partner like that. He likes it. Okay. Look, not yuck and yums. So if you hear your name, come on in. We're going to really party tonight. Black Death is going to tear this place apart afterwards. The band, not the plague. All right.

First up, are you ready, Dave? Absolutely. Yes, please. From Richmond in Melbourne, home of the MCG, which is exactly one MCG size. Please, welcome into the club, Daniel Sullivan. Some people like the musical stylings of Gilbert and Sullivan, but I prefer Daniel and Sullivan.

Woo! Thank you and welcome from Bald Knob here in Queensland where I'm right now, Peter Thames. Peter, go in and enjoy some eater when you get down with that pus. We've got... Woo! Yeah, bald nobs to work with. He always has Gold Knob to work with, mate. Oh, I just never grew down there.

You're saying that. All right, go, go, go, go. The pub never came. Yeah, no, no, we got it. From, is that, well, you said we got it. You said it. Yeah, and then you explained it to me. I was trying to get it.

I got on. Well, I was no, I was asking. Just keep going. There was a question. I'm like, is that what you mean? Shut up. Shut up. From, from Nanaimo or Na Na Na Na Na Naima.

Nanaimo. Na Na Naimaemo from BC. From the lowland. British Cambier and Canada? Yeah. Welcome. Into the club, dog martyr. I would die for you, dog marter.

I'll be your marter. Woofoof. Hello, fata. Hello, dog mata. I was telling me what rhymes with it. I'm like, frog farta. That's not positive. As opposed to pus, whatever you said before.

And finally from Sweden in Swindon in Sweden, I reckon, in Great Britain. Welcome into the club Russell Leak. They're certainly eight week. It's Russell Leak. Oh, I'm coming here all week. Russell Leak. That's good stuff too, yes. Yeah.

I'm a phone. No need to plug this guy. No, that doesn't make any sense. From, thank you so much, Russell, Dog, Peter and Daniel. Thank you, dog. That brings me up. Big stock. Yes, it does bring us to the end of the episode.

Do you need to tell anyone anything? That we love them so much that we thank them for listening. Happy Block to you and yours. Send us pictures of your block trees. You can suggest a topic. There's a link in the show notes. You can find us on social media as well. Do go on pod or do go on podcast on TikTok.

Dave, but there's my behind. Hey, we will be back next week with another block topic. But until then, I will say thank you. so much for listening and goodbye. Bye. Later. We did it. We did it. Well done.