When my daughter was a very little girl, I had occasion to need teach her about the power of belief. Her father was a professional archaeologist, and of course, the scientific method was part of our basic approach to the world. She had classmates who were hard fundamentalist Christians, who soundly rejected the basis of our family’s work. When she was confronted by peers who completely rejected our family’s approach to knowledge, we had to explain that belief is powerful, so powerful that even the obvious truth cannot penetrate that fortress. History gives us example after example of the pernicious power of belief. It is a power that still plagues us.
The Black Plague, or the Bubonic Plague, was a pandemic that ravaged Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa during the Middle Ages. It has achieved almost mythic status as the most devastating pandemic in history. It peaked about the middle of the 14th Century, and mortality estimates run between 75 million to about 200 million souls lost. It created economic devastation throughout the affected areas, and caused crises of faith and political unrest.
Modern analysis suggests that this might have been a dual pandemic, with Bubonic Plague, a bacterial disease caused by Yserinia Pestis accompanied by anthrax. Bubonic Plague takes about a week to kill, while anthrax is much faster. Contemporary accounts talk of people going to bed healthy and waking up dead the next morning, which is more characteristic of anthrax than of the infections caused by Y Pestis. Nevertheless, the population could not make the distinction: what the people, especially of Europe, saw was their neighbors dropping dead of an ugly, painful disease that their God seemed to be doing nothing to stop.
Of course, the people of the Middle Ages did not have access to anything remotely resembling our modern science. They truly believed that disease was an act of God, often as a punishment for some unrecognized sin. So, of course, they reacted with the tools at hand.
During the Black Death, there was a movement of religious people, now called Flagellants. These people wandered around Europe in groups, flogging themselves bloody with cat-o-nine-tails type whips. They believed that they were taking on the sins of the areas they wandered through, and whipped themselves to drive out the demons that were causing the disease. There is a pretty good scene in Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” depicting this behavior. The burning of witches and Jews were other “remedies” spurred by belief and devoid of fact.
The people were not without some treatments that could be successful. One was to lance the “buboes,” or swollen and infected glands, of the plague victims. If they could be prevented from becoming necrotic there was a chance of survival. Other treatments were absurd and ineffective and involved such ingredients as snake venom and human feces. Probably the best that can be said of these treatments is that they hurried the process of death.
Many Medieval European doctors rejected the lancing of the buboes, though, not for what we would call medical reasons, but because this seemed to be a practice promoted by Arabs, who were of course not Christian, and thus not pure. This was unabashed cultural prejudice, which was so common at the time that it could not even be recognized. More’s the pity.
Do we see parallels with our pandemic? Faith, ridiculous gut-level attempts to treat the disease with things that have no good effect, and a kind of cultural madness have taken our people by the scruff of the neck and hurled them back to the middle 1300’s,
Or perhaps we have never really left the middle ages.