Stuff You Should Know - How the Black Death Worked

Episode Date: February 11, 2011

The Black Death was gruesome: Symptoms included tumors, purple splotches, fevers and vomiting. But how did this disease manage to spread from the Gobi desert and kill approximately one-third of the population of 14th-century Europe? Tune in and find out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this Stuff You Should Know. The podcast, the audio podcast, nothing more. Got it? Not a lot less than comparably sized podcasts. No, no. This is Chuck for the good stuff. This

one's good. You think so? Oh yeah, I liked it. You like this one? Yeah, I like some of the historical stuff we do. Man, I love it. You know I was a history major at one point. Yeah, man. Love history. Me too. Yeah. Chuck. Yes. So we're talking about the Black Death. Yeah. Right? Not Black Sabbath, Black Death. Oh, well, I'm going to need some more time then. Okay, so we'll wait. Hold on. All right, I'm back. Black Death. Yes. Okay, you understand now what we're talking about? Great, Chuck. I was researching this to find out, like, okay, what's newsy about the Black Death? Like, how am I going to find an intro? I actually found one. Really? Yeah, it's from 2006, February 2006. Sorry. That's not very newsy. But there is a study that came out of Utrecht

University. Have you ever heard of the Little Ice Age? No. There was a period in world history, global history. I think it may have been kind of localized to Europe. So let's say European history. Okay. In about the 1500s, where there was this inexplicable period of cold. Interesting. Right? It's called the Little Ice Age. Harmful cold? It got cold. Like, our conception of, like, why, you know, Vikings wear pelts and everything. They're always walking around. It's very cold. Yeah. Not just because they live in Scandinavia, but because it was cold then. Okay? Yeah. So this Little Ice Age, like I said, inexplicable. No one had any idea why it happened. And these Utrecht researchers got a hold of some tree samples, some leaf samples from

eras before the Little Ice Age and after. And they started counting stomas. These are the pores on the leaves. The more stomas you have, the more carbon dioxide there is in the air. Leaves develop these stomas so they can absorb more CO2, right? All right. So, if so, facto, the more stomas you have, the more CO2 in the atmosphere. Sure. And what they found by counting these stomas was that there was a lot of CO2 prior to the 1340s in Europe. Okay. That means that there's not that much CO2 or, you know, that there was a lot of CO2 in the air, in the atmosphere. Okay. One reason there's a lot of CO2 is because there's not a lot of trees to soak that CO2 up. Okay. One reason there's not a lot of trees is because humans are cutting down the trees to farm

land, right? Or to stay warm. Did that mean you did that, I say? Sure. There's fewer trees, deforestation brought on by human activity. Okay. So, what they find then is that after 1350, roughly, there's suddenly fewer stomas, which means that there's less CO2 in the air, which means that there's more trees. Do you know why there are more trees? Yeah. Do you? I have a pretty good guess. It's because in between that time, the 1340s and the 1350s, the Black Death happened, and so many people died that it had a measurable effect on the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of not that many trees and then suddenly lots of trees, because there was no one to tend the farmland. Isn't that interesting? You know what else?

This was a tidbit from the end, but we might as well say it here. They think that there is a lack of genetic diversity in the UK today because of the Black Death. They were much more genetically diverse than the 11th century. Right. It represented what's called a population bottleneck. Yeah. 25 million people died. About a third of the population of Europe, which is mind-boggling. Yeah. Yeah, it is. All right. Let's do it. Well, I was reading this one historian. His name is Skip Knox, and I don't know where he is now, but when he wrote that, it was at the University, no, Boise State, and he said- Go Broncos. He goes, it's worth saying this has never happened before or since- What, when the Black Death? An event like this, where within about two, three years,

25 million people died. It's never happened before. Yeah. I mean, no war can account for that. Yeah. No other pandemic. Yeah. This was it. This was as bad as it gets, and it was bad, Chuck. It was bad, and it was bad not just because of the ultimate devastation, but it was bad because of how gnarly the Black Death is. Yeah. Why don't you talk about some symptoms? All right. If you had the Black Death, this is what you had to look forward to. First of all, you had no idea what was happening to you. Neither did your doctor. Neither did your local cardinal or bishop. And, you know, they didn't know a lot back then, but they had their, like, cockeyed theories at least. They didn't even have cockeyed theories on this.

They had a cockeyed theory that everybody went along with. They developed some, but initially they're like, I don't know what this is. Right. But you have these big tumor lumps. You've got them on your body. You've got black spots. Well, tell them about the tumor. Some were small, but they could get pretty big. Yeah. Some as big as an apple, and they said in the article here that if you had one on your neck, it could permanently, like, cock your head to one side. Permanently meaning, like, the five days you had left to live. I know. I hope it's okay to laugh a little bit this now. I mean, surely no.

Ah, this is a century's experience. You had pus oozing out of sores, open sores. You had a nasty smell because you were rotting from the inside out. Your breath was awful. It was gruesome. Purple splotches. God's tokens, right? Yeah, they call them God's tokens because once you got these, that means God's going to take you off the earth pretty soon. Right. That's God's token. Fever that could fry your brain, send you into delirium. Vomiting, coughing up blood, blood and pus oozing. I've already said oozing pus.

I think you did, but it's worth saying twice. So those are some of the symptoms, and once you start having these symptoms, you are pretty much done for within a matter of days. Right. And so in our modern day, it takes a little while to bury somebody, even with this machinery, right, that we use to dig modern graves. But back then, it took even longer to dig a grave, to hold the service, to bury somebody. And when people died within days, and suddenly there was like a third of the population dying off, there was no time to bury anybody. No space.

Yeah. They're literally stacking up. Dogs eating corpses. It says in here, children, hungry babies beside their dead mothers. Yeah. Molly Edmonds really went. Is that you wrote this? Yeah. Yes, but that's the truth. I mean, that was pretty crazy. That was the raw truth. It was an ugly, ugly, ugly scene. And of course, anyone who's seen Monty Python knows that there are people who operated carts that banged on pots and said, bring out your dead. Yeah.

Yeah. And while we'll get into the flinging of corpses, too. Well, let's get into the flinging because that's kind of how it started. And first, I want to point out the Black Death, you know, gripped Europe. It did not only impact Europe. It's so funny. It's so Eurocentric the way we approach the Black Death. It started in the Gobi Desert sometime in the late 1320s in Asia. In China, China lost 35 million people in the 14th century from the Black Death. No one ever mentioned that. I know. They always hear about the Black Death in Europe. So it was localized and it was actually in Asia and Central Asia for a decade or two.

But they blame it pretty squarely on the Genoese for bringing it to Europe, right? Yes. How'd the Genoese get it? Well, in 1347, in Kaffa, which is modern-day Ukraine, it was a Genoese trading post. They were attacked by the Tartar army. Tartars start to die off by the plague and the Genoese are like, sweet, God is punishing our enemies and they're dying. Let's have a big party and celebrate. And then the Tartars are like, well, we're going to start flinging our dead corpses over the wall at you because the smell is so awful, you will die from the smell.

They weren't too far off. It was a stupid idea. A stupid idea, but it worked because what they were doing was germ warfare. Very early germ warfare. Right. They had it wrong, though. They thought it was a smell. Actually, it was this pestilence. And so the Genoese said, oh, we need to get rid of these nasty bodies, but it was too late. They were infected by that point. The Genoese fled to Sicily and then from there it took two paths. One, where was the first one? Well, the first one went up through Austria and Germany. Right. And then the second path went through Italy to France to the UK.

Yes, at a speed which doesn't sound fast, but it really is if you're talking about Black Death, about two and a half miles a day. And not only is it fast like even by today's standards, this is before, this is when people were riding horses in carts and stuff. Yeah, two and a half miles a day was fast. That's real. It's lightning fast. This bullet train fast for that time. Yeah. Why does it call the Black Death, actually? Do you know this? I do. So there's a mistranslation at some point. What do you mean? Well, back in the day, people called it the Big Death or the Great Mortality, the Big Death. That's bad. That's what they called it as it was happening. Right. And then later on,

it came to be known as the Atra Morse, which is Latin for terrible death or Black Death. At some point in time, somebody decided that they liked the Black Death better. In some time in the 18th century, when they were using it to differentiate the plague of London in 1665. But they mistranslated. It wasn't originally called the Black Death or the terrible death. It was called the Big Death. Gotcha. And then it just kind of went from there. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy, number one, is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana.

Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And on the prime example. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Nikki Lynette, the host of About a Girl here to tell you about our new season.

Every episode of About a Girl digs deep to explore the real stories of women who were there playing an important role in the creation of classic, beloved music. For every story you might think you know, there's always another side. Claudia Lanier sang with Ike and Tina Turner, George Harrison and Bob Dylan. But she also inspired songs by David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and Leon Russell. Sharon Osborn is a household name today, but she toiled for years under the sway of her violent criminal father before a turbulent marriage to Ozzie very nearly killed her. Shirley and Willie Nelson, Shantae Brodis and Snoop, even Beyonce. I'm excited to tell you all about them on About a Girl season four. Listen to About a Girl on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Well, at the time, King Philip VI of France turned it over to the Paris College of Physicians who were, they were like, the Mayo Clinic of the time. And they said here, we need to figure out what this is. What is it? Smartest doctors in the world. And they says, we know, we figured it out. It's all here in the report. This is, this happened when Saturn and Jupiter and Mars lined up in Aquarius and Jupiter's roll wet and hot. And it soaked up the evil vapors from the Earth and Mars is dry. So it exploded those vapors. And now it is a fog of death. And they very smugly pinpointed the time that it happened one PM on March 20th, 1345. And they just shook their head like, yeah.

Yeah. But they did say it was a fog of death. My guess is that it was probably pretty foggy for some reason. Some weather system happened or they were onto something like it was being transmitted through the air somehow. Sure. Which, you know, they might have been actually onto something there with an airborne pathogen. Right. Possibly. But instead, they went with the fog of death from the planet's aligning. And another term for a fog of death is a miasma. It's a corrupted bit of air. And this is what Europe went with, right? Yeah. Like, okay, well, these are the smartest guys as far as medicine goes. They have the longest crow's beak masks of anybody. Yeah. And we're going to go with this fog of death thing. So how

do we combat it? And what they figured out was, well, since you're breathing this fog, you got to keep the fog at bay. And one good way to do that is to fight fog with fire or smoke. Sure. So there were fires everywhere. Yeah. They were recommended to burn aromatic wood so people would and people would even carry this stuff around. Rosemary, amber and musk. The pope even stood between two fires when he addressed people. Yeah. They kept them burning on street corners. Yeah. And then there were the fact that it was coming from the south and it was a fog of death. They started putting glass in their southern windows so that the southern wing couldn't penetrate it. See that kind of smart there. It is. They weren't all hokey. Now some that seemed kind of smart. What

didn't seem very smart was don't bathe, don't have physical intimacy, although it's a good way to spread disease. So maybe they're onto something there. Don't sleep during the daytime. Avoid sad thoughts. That had nothing to do with spreading it. They're like, just don't be lazy. Yeah. Yeah. Avoid sad thoughts about disease. There's something to that if you believe in the mind. If you believe in positive psychology. Exactly. So some of the little hokeys, those little substance to a bit of it. I have a little cocktail tidbit for you though. Let's see. I know. I know it is. This is so awesome. I know. The word quarantine actually comes from the Black Death in Venice, Italy. They were pretty smart and they said, you know,

we should start isolating some of these ships of people that are coming in. Not let them come on land until we know that no one on board is sick. So let's do this for like 30 days. And then they went, no, that's not long enough. Let's do it for 40 days. 40 days or quarantine. It's where the word came from. Well, it's not as much of a stretch of somebody besides Chuck is pronouncing it. But yes, that is where quarantine came from. Look at it. It looks like the word quarantine. Yeah. So that's pretty smart too. There are some smart people. Still 60% of the population of Venice died within, I think, 18 months. Yeah. So the quarantine while practical and useful, you know, didn't protect everybody. Yeah. And you know, we don't know what the doctors were doing that much

because all we have here is just recorded documents of what was going on. Well, there wasn't even documentation. It was popular writers. Yeah. Church writers. It wasn't like science journals. I mean, not a lot of people knew how to read and write during this time. And the ones who did normally were affiliated with the church. So they would have had a very religious view of what was going on, right? Yeah. They're probably bloodletting. Yeah. The physicians that were working, the crow's mask guys, were bloodletting. They were opening up these boobos, which is... It's almost like a textual representation of a pussy tumor. Yeah. A bubo. They would open these and then drain them because that made sense to get rid of whatever's in there, I guess. Very smart. Yeah. We still

do that today. Pop and zits. Yeah. Every Tuesday. Religion comes into play pretty heavily there because a lot of people said, you know, let's turn to God and pray for help. Well, a lot of people thought that this was punishment from God. Oh, yeah. The flagellants. Yeah. And so only he could do anything about it. Or she, depending on New York. Yeah, sure. And so, yes, the flagellants. Chuck, take it. The flagellants of Germany. Yeah. The brotherhood of the flagellants. Flagellants. Flagellants. Had already been around. Not flagellants, though. No. Very big difference. They were already around, but they rose up, like you said, in Germany in the mid-1340s. And they thought it was punishment from God. And they thought, you know what,

we're going to do something about it. So you've heard of self-flagellation. That's where it comes from. They would walk barefoot across Europe, whipping themselves with their little whatever cat of nine tails. Scourges. Scourges. Like sticks that had like sharp kind of barbed ends. It didn't work, though. And a lot of people turned against God because of that. They also killed a lot of Jews. The flagellants did. They were flagellants. Yeah, people. They were highly anti-Semitic. They killed Jews. They would kill clergy that opposed them, except for the Pope. And the Pope was like, you're officially denounced in, I think, 1349. And that was it for the flagellants. Although they popped up again in later plagues

and pestilences. Oh, they did. But they stopped for the Black Death immediately when the Pope denounced them. Well, they killed Jews because there was a pretty bad rumor going around that the Jews were poisoning the water supply. And because at the time, Christians and Jews lived separately largely, a lot of Jewish communities were effectively quarantined, so they didn't get hit as hard. So all of a sudden, Jews are, I don't know, prospering is the right word, but they're not dying like the Christians are. So the Christians started burning them alive. They started burning them alive. Apparently in Strasbourg, the more Jews died in Germany, than anywhere else at the hands of Christians who were upset about the plague. And in Strasbourg,

in, let's see, I think 1348, on one day, 200 Jews were burned alive at the stake. Just that one city on that one day. And apparently entire communities used to be walled up and set on fire with everybody. Or Jews would convert Christianity on the spot. Or they would set their own houses on fire, which is kind of sensible. Like, oh, look, my house is on fire, but I should probably take off. Right. Keep on walking. See you guys later. Well, a lot of Jews fled to the countryside, didn't they too? Yes. Because they were able to. Yeah. Good for them is what I said. Well, I don't think it was just Jews. I think anybody who had the means of going to the countryside, which is crazy because I mean, going to the countryside means like stepping out your back

door, I thought, in like the 14th century. Yeah. But apparently there was still the wealthy went out to the country once in a while and they would. Right. Yeah. So it was needless to say it was a really rough few years for Europe. And by 1352, it was largely gone. Yeah, it just took off. But what? I mean, there was, it's not like, all right, black desk on, everything's cool now. There were like huge, huge effects. Apparently the self-flagellation worked, right? Yeah. Sure. That's what it was. Well, yeah, you have to imagine if a third, right? So that means that between you, me and Jerry, one of us dies. Well, it'd clearly be me. It's not necessarily true. I'd set myself on fire. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take

to America's public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss y'all. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Nikki Lynette, the host of About a Girl, here to tell you about our new season. Every episode of About a Girl digs deep to explore the real stories of women who were there, playing an important role in the creation of classic, beloved music. For every story you might think you know, there's always another side. Claudia Lanier sang with Ike and Tina Turner, George Harrison and Bob Dylan. But she also inspired songs by David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and Leon Russell. Sharon Osborn is a household name today, but she toiled for years under the sway of her violent criminal father before a turbulent marriage to Ozzie very nearly killed her.

Shirley and Willie Nelson, Shantae Brody and Snoot, even Beyonce. I'm excited to tell you all about them on About a Girl season four. Listen to About a Girl on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so then two of us would have died. Yeah. Right? I mean, a third of this population of the workforce within like seriously like two years is just gone. People are being eaten by dogs or corpses are being eaten by dogs in the streets. Families are just completely abandoning one another once they get sick. The whole social psyche, the collective psyche of Europe just kind of crumbled a little bit. It took a pretty big ding in one of the places it took that ding was in religion. A lot of heretical society sprung up

because it was like either this was your work, God, or you didn't do anything to help us. So we're not coming to church anymore. Well, yeah, instead of being like really thankful that they survived people partied like it was 1999. Yeah, big time. Crazy parties. Yeah, a lot of debauchery. Lots of debauchery. There was an economic impact to a huge one. Well, yeah, if half your, sorry, if a third of the workforce is gone, you've got no one working. So labor's going to skyrocket. The price of labor is price of labor is a cost of goods, food, you know, the little silver lining there, food was in supply because there weren't as many people to eat it. Exactly. Sadly, isn't it depressing? The other cool thing now is it's potentially we saw the birth of modern

science and medicine. Yeah, because of the Black Death because the leaders were like, you know, this whole planet's aligning thing was pretty stupid now that we look back at it. So why don't we found some schools and do some real research based on physical science and give that a whirl? Yeah. And it started it. It worked, which is kind of ironic as well because the population was so decimated that even after they had this idea, they had to wait a little while to reopen schools because they couldn't staff them. Oh, yeah. And also, Chuck, there was an almost complete loss of any illusions about death and whether or not it's coming for you. There's a whole allegory and art that sprang up at the time called Dance Macabre, which is the Dance of Death, which is

basically like, you know, showing living people and skeletons, you know, working side by side or hanging out or partying together or whatever. And the point of that is that, you know, death can come at any time and it's coming for everybody. So art and poetry and things like that just took a real downer turn there for a while. Yeah. Because that was clearly what everyone was thinking about at the time. That's right, Chuck. What caused it? See, this is where I get a little confused because there's conflicting information even to this day. Well, it's one of the things where we thought we figured it out, but modern techniques and modern investigation have kind of led us to think, did you like that? Yeah. Have led us to think that maybe that first idea wasn't right.

Yeah, yeah. First idea came out of the third pandemic, which was in 1894 in Hong Kong and India, right? Yeah, yeah. And two bacteriologists, Alexander Yersin and Shibasaburo Kita Sato. Nice. Thanks. They worked independently and isolated the cause of that third pandemic, and it is what we know today as bubonic plague. Yeah. It's a bacterium called Yersina Pestis named after Alexander Yersin, right? Yeah, of course. And it lives in the foregut of fleas, rodent fleas that feast on rats. Yeah, this was interesting. Yeah. Because the flea bites the regular flea bites rat and drinks blood and it's like, oh man, that was fantastic. Oh, that was delicious. If you're infected with the Yersina, Yersinia Pestis in your flea,

you bite the rodent and you eat the blood, but it gets stuck in your foregut and so you never feel that quench of that tasty, tasty blood in your stomach. If you're a flea, so you keep biting more and more rodents. And infecting more and more rodents. Yeah, because you're like we talked about with the fleas, regurgitating it back onto rodents, and all of a sudden you're killing all these rodents and then when there are no more rodents and the fleas will go to people. Right. And so they thought that's how it was spread. Right. Which makes sense because it's not like conditions were really sanitary in the Middle Ages or before the Middle Ages, the 14th century, right? Yeah. Yeah, there were plenty of rats, plenty of fleas. The problem is there's a lot of

discrepancies between bubonic plague or Yersina, Yersinia Pestis, and whatever the black death was, right? So you've got like a big discrepancies. You've got bubos, right? Yes. With both, but bubos under the bubonic plague tend to spring up around the groin area only. Yeah. And descriptions of bubos with the black death were that they were all over the place, all over your body. Right. Bubos or bubonic plague doesn't cause purple splotches. No. It doesn't cause delirium. No, the odors. Yeah, or the vomiting, blood and pus and all that stuff. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff that was documented widely by different sources during the black death that doesn't have anything in common with bubonic plague. Well, the big one to me was the fact that bubonic plague,

even if you don't treat it as mortality rate of about 60 percent. Yeah. And from the sounds of the black death, it was near 100 taken down entire villages. Right. So they did figure out that the third pandemic in 1894 was caused by Yersinia Pestis bubonic plague, but they erroneously possibly attributed it to the black death. But for about 100 years, that was the premise that everyone went on was bubonic plague was the black death. Right. Until 1984 when some researchers who have been dubbed plague deniers. Oh, really? Yeah. Have started to come up with competing theories and there's some interesting ones. Yeah. Sociologists Susan Scott and biologist Christopher Duncan think that it is a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola. Right. Makes sense. Sure.

Some say anthrax or maybe some just disease that is not around, some extinct disease. Right. Like it went extinct somehow after the black death. The thing though is this DNA study in the 1990s, they dug up some corpses from mass graves in France, tested the teeth, because I guess dental pulp is about the only thing you can test at that point. And they did find that the Y Pestis in the samples, so they said, oh yeah, see it was the plague. But then they apparently looked at other bodies from other grave sites and it wasn't conclusive. So they didn't find it. Yeah, they didn't find it at all. Yeah. So what does that mean? I don't know. What do you think? Well, Skip Knox, that historian I referred to earlier, his

theory is that it was bubonic plague working in concert with a mnemonic plague. So it was respiratory, which is bubonic. Yeah, which basically his idea is that there are two plagues working at once, or that's the theory he subscribes to, which I don't know. It seems likely to me that there's probably some bacterium that's either extinct or worse than that dormant. Right, right. Let's hope it's extinct. Yeah. Dormant's not the word I want to be hearing right now. Oh, and there's one other thing that was a problem with the fleas. There were two other problems that we didn't mention. One was that there should have been a die-off of rats, because remember they jumped from rats to humans when there's no more rats. Right.

And there's no documented die-off of rats in Europe before the plague. Ever. And then secondly, what was the second one? Winter should kill fleas. That's right, Chuck. But it didn't. Well, it does kill fleas, but it didn't have any effect on the spread of the Black Death. Yeah. Well, the other problem, though, is like we said, it's all stuff that's written down, so it's not like, you know, you said the boobos are near the groin area, but at the time, you know, with the sensationalism of the day, people, they could have been writing, you know, sores all over their body, and, you know, they could have exaggerated some of the symptoms. Right. Because of fear. I just don't know how much I trust the records of the 1300s in Europe.

Well, plus also there was no standardized medical jargon either for them to use. Yeah, that's true, too. Or that they could use that we would understand. Yeah. So we're cobbling together what we think they meant, what this one person meant. But they think the numbers of deaths are pretty accurate. Really? Yeah. This is pretty crazy. One-third. Oh, and we were talking about how it's so Eurocentric. In Cairo, 7,000 deaths a day at its peak. The bubonic plague or black death? Sorry, the black death. Wow. Let's say for black death, if you want to see some pretty cool pictures and read more about it, I strongly recommend this one. Type in black death in the search bar

at howstuffworks.com, and it's time now for Listener Mail. Josh, I'm going to call this our second mafia mail. Sometimes we get so much mail from one topic that we feel like we should read more than one email on that topic. Especially when it's accompanied by physical threats. That's right. So this is from Kate the Canuck Stewart. That's what she calls herself, which I thought was kind of funny. Hi, Josh and Chuck and Jerry. I'm a huge fan of the podcast, but I've never written in before because I never had much to say besides, oh my gosh, I love you guys. It's a great reason to write in, by the way. Sure. However, after listening to the mafia cast, I just had to write

you an email to have some info from my family's past. My grandmother on my mother's side is a second cousin to the infamous lucky Luciano. Most of the men in her family were made, and although she was largely kept out of the loop when it came to the wheelings and underdealings of her family, like Diane Keaton and the Godfather, there is one event that really brought home the kinds of things her brother and cousins were up to. When my mom was only a baby, my grandfather ran out on my grandma. When my great uncle heard about this, he and his cousins asked my grandma if she wanted them to take care of him for her. She really didn't know what that meant, but responded, maybe even jokingly, well, don't kill him or anything. The next day, she got a phone call that her husband

had been admitted to a hospital, badly beaten, with both of his legs broken. Wow. Clearly, it wasn't prudent to mess around with members of my family. There are other rumors swirling around about different ventures that my great uncle and cousins were involved in, but they were notoriously tight-lipped about everything. As far as I know, no one in my family is a part of the mob anymore, and no one has broken the legs of any of my ex-boyfriends, but I wouldn't date you. Just to be on the safe side, huh? That is Kate the Canuck. Wow. Thanks a lot, Kate. Appreciate that. And all you Canucks listening out there, thank you very much. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. To learn more about the

podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The HowStuffWorks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and social disruption,

and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Brien. Every week on Crash Course, I'm going to bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic upheavals occur, and I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power. Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.