virus has changed the world and changed people's lifestyles. How did humans survive the shadow of death? Let us look back at the plagues in history that "killed countless people" and witnessed the fragility and tenacity of life amid the ravages of viruses. is here to detail the frightening deadly epidemics and use a scientific perspective to dissect the viruses that have changed history time and time again.
The plague seems far away from healthy humans, but in fact, it follows you and me.
Viruses have been a threat to humans for a long time. When a new pathogen appears in the population and easily infects people and causes severe symptoms, a pandemic often breaks out, causing heavy casualties. The Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century is a representative example.
This article will discuss in detail plague, smallpox, influenza , malaria, coronavirus, Ebola and other viruses that are raging around the world, revealing the viruses under the microscope and depicting scenes of infection. The pictures of the medical history sort out the efforts made by mankind to fight against the virus.
The Black Death - a turning point in European history
The 1440s and 1950s were an extremely tragic period for Europe. From 1347 to 1353, the great plague known as the "Black Death" swept across Europe, killing 25 million Europeans, accounting for 1/3 of the total European population at that time.
In this great plague, Italy and France were the hardest hit; while a few countries, such as Poland and Belgium, were lucky enough to escape the huge impact of this disaster. Among the cities, the most severely affected city was Florence, Italy, the hometown of Boccaccio: 80% of the people died of the Black Death. In "The Decameron" written by Boccaccio, who witnessed it, Florence suddenly became a hell on earth: pedestrians walking on the street suddenly fell to the ground and died; people who stayed at home died alone, No one knows about the smell of corpses until they are smelled; a large number of corpses are transported outside the city every day and every hour; cows roam the streets of the city, but no one is seen.
This is actually the plague, a highly infectious disease well known in China.
Plague, although the death toll from the plague may be comparable to that of smallpox, in terms of the terror index, it deserves to be ranked first.
There have been three plague pandemics in human history. The first occurred in the mid-sixth century and disappeared by the eighth century. It swept across the Eurasian continent, and the death toll is estimated to be at least tens of millions. Because the location of the plague outbreak was Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire , where a large number of caravans and fleets from other continents gathered, and the plague was also brought to other continents. Nowadays, we speculate that it was the plague, but to people at the time, it was God's punishment, which affected the popularity of Christianity, and imperial power began to rely on divine power. It was also this plague that led to a sharp decline in the number of people in the Eastern Roman Empire and gave the Arabs the opportunity to finally dominate Eurasia. This was also related to this.
The second plague pandemic is what we know as the Black Death in the European Middle Ages. It was named "Black Death" because the body turned purple-black after death.
The Black Death occurred in the mid-14th century, killing nearly 30 million people on the European continent in just a few years. It raged across the European continent for three hundred years, wiping out nearly half of the European population. This plague is also called the most serious one in human history. The shadow it has caused to Europeans can be imagined, and it has also made the word "black" the most ominous word, such as Black Friday.
The duration of the plague is also related to the demise of the Ming Dynasty. The reason why Li Zicheng easily captured Beijing was, in addition to other factors, also closely related to the ongoing plague outbreak in the capital. As for whether the plague was transmitted from Europe Yes, unknown.
"Records of Chongzhen" records:
"There was a great epidemic in the capital, and tens of thousands of people died every day."
This plague also made people doubt God. Why did people continue to die despite praying every day? It promoted the development of modern medicine. .
The third plague outbreak occurred at the end of the 19th century and ended at the beginning of the 20th century. It started in southern China and spread rapidly northward to other continents. Although is not as powerful as the second plague, and people have begun to formulate control measures, this epidemic has also swept away the lives of more than 10 million people.
The reason why the plague outbreak in China could be effectively controlled was thanks to one person. He was the then deputy supervisor of Tianjin Beiyang Army Medical CollegeWu Liande. It was he who mobilized all resources to isolate and control infected people, overturned the Japanese research claims, and chaired and convened the International Plague Research Conference in 1911.
It is not an exaggeration to call him an unparalleled scholar in the country. As a result, he became a pioneer of modern Chinese medicine and the founder of Chinese quarantine and immunology.
The Spanish influenza - the most lethal virus in history
On March 4, 1918, influenza broke out in a military camp in Kansas, in the United States, and then in China, Spain, the United Kingdom and other continents except Australia. . The only symptoms at that time were headache, high fever, muscle aches and loss of appetite. But by the autumn of 1918, it broke out in large numbers around the world. By the spring of 1920, it caused about 1 billion infections and about 25 million to 100 million deaths worldwide.
In fact, the "Patient Zero" of the Spanish Flu originated in the United States. The U.S. military carrying the influenza virus went to support the European battlefields of World War I. Three months later, the German army was also infected, and nearly 500,000 soldiers were lying in the hospital— -This influenza unexpectedly kicked off Germany's defeat. Since Spain was a neutral country in the war, Spain became the "scapegoat" for the flu under the exaggeration of the British, French and American media. In order to get rid of the term "Spanish Flu", the Spaniards fought hard for a full century. , in 2015, the World Health Organization finally announced that it is forbidden to name new diseases after place names.
Spanish influenza is the deadliest infectious disease in human history. From 1918 to 1919, it infected about 1 billion people around the world and caused at least 25 million deaths worldwide. (the world population at that time was about 1.7 billion people); its global average mortality rate was about 2.5%-5%, which was significantly higher than the 0.1% of ordinary influenza.
This influenza spread all over the world, from the Eskimo tribe in Alaska to the Samoa island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. No one was spared; many Eskimo tribes died in one village after another, and the mortality rate in Samoa was as high as 25%. Marajó Island at the mouth of the Amazon River was the only human gathering place in the world with no reports of infection at that time.
This wave of influenza was also introduced to Taiwan, China , killing about 40,000 people at that time. The first wave of influenza began in Keelung, Taiwan, in early June 1918, then spread throughout the island and disappeared by late September, with no particularly significant mortality. In late October, the second wave of influenza began to appear from Keelung, and spread southward along the railway to Hsinchu, Taichung, Tainan , Dagou, Agou and other places, and was introduced to Hualien Port by sea. and Penghu , which ended in mid-December, causing about 770,000 infections and 25,394 deaths. In December 1919, the third wave of influenza began in Keelung and ended at the end of February 1920, causing more than 140,000 infections and 19,244 deaths. The epidemic first broke out in the Japanese community and then spread to Taiwanese people. It first broke out in cities and towns and then spread to rural areas. At that time, Taiwan's medical resources were lacking. Among Taiwan's 3.67 million people, there were only 732 Western doctors with four years of medical education. Japanese patients receive better medical care, so the mortality rate is lower, with a mortality rate of 1.1%; that of Taiwanese Han people is 3.3%, and that of Taiwanese aborigines is 3.5%.
An important phenomenon of this influenza is that the mortality rate is higher among young adults.
In this regard, there are two hypotheses: One is that the elderly population has already experienced influenza and therefore has antibodies, so they are more resistant to influenza.Second, young and middle-aged people have better immune systems. In the process of eliminating foreign viruses, the fever and inflammation caused by them are also more serious; an overreaction of the immune system may lead to a cytokine storm (Cytokine storm), causing damage to human tissues or organs. Damage; if it occurs in the lungs, it may cause difficulty in breathing and death.
The Spanish flu disappeared completely within 18 months, and the strain was never truly identified.
Smallpox - the driving force behind world history
Smallpox is one of the oldest infectious diseases with the highest mortality rate. It is highly contagious and severe. People who have not had smallpox or have not been vaccinated against smallpox can be infected. Mainly It manifests as severe viremia and high mortality after infection.
1507 or so, smallpox was brought to the Americas by a sick black slave, and it has been raging in the Americas ever since. The Indians of the New World have been isolated from the humans of the Old World for tens of thousands of years. They lack immune function and knowledge of epidemic prevention against diseases such as smallpox, measles, diphtheria, typhoid, mumps, and influenza. They fell in droves.
The colonists soon realized that smallpox was a powerful weapon . Many materials recorded the colonists' scandalous behavior of deliberately spreading smallpox to the Indians. For example, when the British were unable to advance in Canada, they negotiated peace with the Indians and gave pillows and quilts contaminated by smallpox patients as gifts to the Indians. Subsequently, diseases such as mumps, measles, cholera, gonorrhea and yellow fever also arrived one after another from Europe. Under the influence of the smallpox virus and the massacre by colonists, the population of Native Americans decreased by tens of millions or even nearly 100 million. This was an unprecedented genocide in human history.
Smallpox is even worse than the plague. The plague is often only prevalent in a specific area, at least it has not spread to the whole world. But smallpox is different. People all over the world have nowhere to hide. No matter you are a noble or a poor person, no one can hide. It has killed hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of years.
Many people say that modern Western medicine is more advanced. In fact, if you study carefully, you will find that in the era of fighting infectious diseases, Chinese people are far better than Westerners. For example, the plague mentioned above did not wreak havoc on a large scale in China at least, nor did it sweep away tens of millions of people at every turn. Another example is smallpox. The first person to invent vaccination was not the Western doctor Jenner who observed milkmaids, but the Chinese.
As early as the Jin Dynasty, Ge Hong's "Recipes for Saving Soldiers Behind the Elbow" contains a method of using the brains of dead rabid dogs to apply on the wounds of people bitten by dogs to prevent rabies. At the same time, there is also a record of "capture sores", which records the origin of smallpox:
"The gains from fighting captives in Nanyang during Jianwu are actually sores of captives."
In the Tang Dynasty medical book "Qianjin Yaofang", there is such a paragraph Records: "Recipe for treating red and black blemishes on children: needle the father's feet, take blood and apply it to the blemishes and they will disappear." It is said that this is the earliest record of Chinese people being vaccinated against pox.
In fact, by the Qing Dynasty, the method of vaccination had become very popular . It is recorded in the "Jinjing Fu Collection of Pox Branch": "The method of vaccination started in the Longqing period of the Ming Dynasty, in Taiping County, Ningguo Prefecture. The surname was not tested and was obtained by a stranger. From then on, it spread all over the world, and most of the people who grow flowers today are from Ningguo. "
However, why this method was not popularized after the rule of the Qing Dynasty is really a mystery. Why Emperor Shunzhi and Emperor Tongzhi also died of smallpox is difficult to understand. .
Smallpox is also the largest infectious disease that humans have conquered so far. The cowpox vaccination method began to be widely used in Europe and North America after 1798. In 1979, the last smallpox patient recovered. Since then, smallpox has been completely eradicated from mankind, and the inventor, Jenner, is also known as the father of the vaccine.
That’s it for introducing the three ancient “gods of death” in this issue~
See you in the next issue!
