Plagues in Human History
Episode 1 - March 30, 2020
Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Merle and Lee talk about the scientific and medical background to the plague describing the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, and how it sickens and kills humans. They offer an overview of the 3 historical plague pandemics, where we can find plague today, and touch upon the obsession with plague in popular culture.
Further Reading
- The best introduction to the plague is Paul Slack’s volume. Plague: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012
- More on the medical background can be found on the CDC Website on Plague
- More about the history of the bacterium itself can be found in: Zhemin Zhou et al., “The EnteroBase user's guide, with case studies on Salmonella transmissions, Yersinia pestis phylogeny, and Escherichia core genomic diversity ,” Genome Research. 30, (2020): 138-152. The broader history of disease and plague is included in J.N. Hays’s The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History, Revised Edition