Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How the Black Death Worked

Episode Date: August 3, 2019

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? Find out in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey there, everyone. It's your old pal, Josh. And for this week's S-Y-S-K Selects, I chose how the Black Death worked. It's a look at a fascinating few years

when a mystery disease, we still don't know what it was, swept across Europe and Asia and killed a significant portion of the world. Check it out and enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. 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. Then Comparably Sized Podcasts. No, no, this is chock full of good stuff. This one's gotta be, man. 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 of 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 gonna need some more time then. Okay, so we'll wait, hold on. Okay.

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 gonna find an intro? I actually found one. Really?

Yeah, it's from 2006, February 2006. Sorry. That's not very newsy. But there was 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 why Vikings wear pelts and everything, they're always walking around, it's very cold. 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.

But 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 was not that much CO2, or no, 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 go to the ice age? 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 either or 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, the Black Death? Yeah, an event like this, where within about two, three years, 25 million people died. It's never happened before.

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 were like, I don't know what this is, but you have these big tumor lumps. You've got them on your body. You 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,

and you surely know it from the 1300s. Ah, this is centuries ago. 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 gonna take you off the earth pretty soon. Right. So that's God's token. Fever's 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, even. They're literally stacking up.

Dogs eating corpses. It says in here, children, hungry babies, beside their dead mothers. Yeah, Molly Edmonds really went. Did I do that one? Yeah. Man. Yes, but that's the truth. I mean, that was the raw truth.

That 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. My S K S K and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Because I'll be there for you and so will my husband, Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy thunder each week to guide you through life

step by step. Ah, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so will never, ever have to say say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Well 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 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 China. China lost 35 million people in the 14th century from the Black Death. But 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. Heavins. 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, but... Stupid idea, but it worked because they actually, 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. And then the second path went through Italy to France to the UK. Yes. 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 and carts and stuff. Yeah, two and a half miles a day was not... That's really lightning fast. This is bullet train fast for that time. Yeah. 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. It's sometime in the 18th century when they were using it to differentiate the plague of London in 1665.

But they mistranslated it. 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. 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 said, you know, we figured it out. It's all here in the report. This happened when Saturn

and Jupiter and Mars lined up in Aquarius. And Jupiter's real 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, 1 p.m. on March 20th, 1345. And they just shook their head like, 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. Who knows. But instead, they went with the fog of death from the planets 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. 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 woods 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. 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.

No, 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. Yeah, that's just lazy. They had nothing to do with spreading it. They're like, just don't be lazy. Yeah, yeah. Avoid sad thoughts about disease. Mm-hmm. That's something to that if you believe in the mind.

If you believe in positive psychology. Exactly. So some of the little hokey, there was a little substance to a bit of it. I have a little cocktail tidbit for you though. Let's hear it. I know what 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 what? 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. Right. 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. If you 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, church writers. Yeah. 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. Like, 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, a boobo.

They would open these and then drain them because that made sense to get rid of whatever is 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. So only he could do anything about it. Or she, depending on who you are. Yeah, sure. And so, yes, the flagellants. Chuck, take it. The flagellants of Germany. Yeah. The brotherhood of the 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. Scourges. What have you? 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. The flagellants. Yeah, people. They were highly anti-Semitic. Didn't they? 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 Christians, although they popped up again in later plagues and pestilences.

Oh, they did? Uh-huh. 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...

So the Christians started burning them alive. They started burning them alive. Apparently, in Strasbourg, Germany was 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 see. 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 stepping out your back door, I thought, in the 14th century. But apparently, the wealthy went out to the country once in a while and they would, yeah. That's what you should know on the podcast. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey, dude, bring you back to the days

of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey, dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey, dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Life in relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So it was a 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. It had huge, huge effects. Apparently the self-flagellation worked, right? Yeah. I'm 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, I'd clearly be me.

It's not necessarily true. I'd set myself on fire. Okay. So then two of us would have died. Yeah. Right? But I mean, a third, 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. Yeah. And 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 basically. Yeah. Big time. Crazy parties. Yeah. A lot of debauchery.

Lots of debauchery. There was an economic impact too, a huge one. Well, yeah. 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. Yeah. Cost of goods, food, the little silver lining there.

Food was in supply because there weren't as many people to eat it. Exactly. Sadly. Isn't that depressing? The other cool thing though is potentially we saw the birth of modern science and medicine 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 that kind of 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 was 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? Have led us to think that maybe that first idea wasn't right. First idea came out of the third pandemic, which was in 1894 in Hong Kong and India. And two bacteriologists, Alexander Yersin and Shibasaburo Kitasato, thanks.

They worked independently and isolated the cause of that third pandemic. And it is what we know today as Bubonic Plague. It's a bacterium called Yersinapestis named after Alexander Yersin, right? And it lives in the foregut of rodent fleas that feast on rats. Yeah, this was interesting, I thought, because the flea bites the regular flea bites rat and drinks blood, and it's like, oh man, that was fantastic, I feel terrific. If you're infected with Yersinapestis and you're a 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, we're gergitating it back onto rodents, and all of a sudden you're killing all these rodents, and then when there are no more rodents, then the fleas will go to people. And so they thought that's how it was spread. Which makes sense, because it's not like conditions were really sanitary in the Middle Ages. Sure, there were plenty of rats.

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 Yersinapestis, and whatever the black death was, right? So you've got... Like big discrepancies. So you've got bubos, right?

Yes. With both. But bubos under the bubonic plague tend to spring up around the groin area only. And descriptions of bubos with the black death were that they were all over the place, all over your body. Bubos or bubonic plague doesn't cause purple splotches. It doesn't cause delirium, or the vomiting, blood and pus and all that stuff. 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, has a mortality rate of about 60%. And from the sounds of the black death, it was near 100 taken down in entire villages. Right. And 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. Until 1984, when some researchers who have been dubbed plague deniers 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. No, they didn't find it. 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. Bubonumonic? 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 likelier 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, or they were supposed to. 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 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, you know? 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. Yeah. 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 for 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's 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. 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. I appreciate that, and all you Canucks listening out there, thank you very much. If you want to get in touch with Chuck or me, you can get in touch with us via Twitter.

That's right. At S-Y-S-K Podcast, you can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. Send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, go check out our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

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