Everyone's Dead

More from The Great Mortality,


(Detail of Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece showing evidence of ergotism on some unlucky guy's feet)

Strange diets, putrid food, and a generally lower resistance to disease also produced a great many hard human deaths. Of ergotism, which seems to have been especially common, one English monk write, "It is a dysentary-type illness, contracted on account of spoiled food... from which follow[s] a throat ailment or acute fever." However, this description does not do justice to the full horrors of ergotism, which was called St. Anthony's fire in the Middle Ages. First, the ergot fungus, a by-product of moldy wheat, attacks the muscular system, inducing painful spasms, then the circulatory system, interrupting blood flow and causing gangrene. Eventually the victim's arms and legs blacken, decay and fall off; LSD-like hallucinations are also common. If the Irish Famine of 1847 is a reliable indicator, vitamin deficiencies were also rife. Between 1315 and 1322, when the rain finally stopped, many people must have become demented from pellagra (niacin deficiency) or been blinded by xerophthalmia (a vitamin A deficiency). Typhus epidemics may have killed many thousands more.

(62)


(severe ergotism)

On the meanest of medieval streets, the ambience of the barnyard gave way to the ambience of the battlefield. Often, animals were abandoned where they fell, left to boil in the summer sun, to be picked over by rats and ransacked by neighborhood children, who yanked bones from decaying oxen and cows and carved them into dice. The municipal dog catcher, who rarely picked up after a dog cull (kill), and the surgeon barber, who rarely poured his patients' blood anywhere except on the street in front of the shop, also contributed to the squalid morning-after-battle atmosphere.

Along with the dog catcher and surgeon barber, Rattus's other great urban ally was the medieval butcher. In Paris, London, and other large towns, animals were slaughtered outdoors on the street, and since butchers rarely picked up after themselves either, in most cities the butchers' district was a Goya-esque horror of animal remains. Rivers of blood seeped into nearby gardens and parks, and piles of hearts, livers, and intestines accumulated under the butchers' bloody boots, attracting swarms of rats, flies, and street urchins.

(69)

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That and this from 1998,

Americans Don't Have a Clue

Imagine downtown Los Angeles, New York or Washington, where 100,000 inhabitants, from garbage collectors to CEOs, in kindergarten classes to nursing homes, suddenly and without warning begin drowning in their own bodily fluids or suffocating on swollen tongues as mucus pours from every orifice, even while windpipes and blood vessels constrict, stopping the flow of air and blood. People in the streets and their homes convulsing so violently that internal organs are displaced and then shut down in terrifying manifestations of agony.

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But, you know, don't be blue. It can't be all that bad, right?

More Black Death

(Oh my word, what a monumental pita this passport thing is. Note to self, never ever let this thing expire ever again.)

More from The Great Mortality:

On the second day of illness, Kutluk awoke with a terrible pain in his groin; overnight, a hard, apple-sized lump had formed between his navel and his penis. That afternoon, when Magnu-Kelka probed the tumor with a finger, the pain was so terrible, Kutluk rolled over on his side and vomited again.

Toward evening, Kutluk developed a new symptom; he began to cough up thick knots of bloody mucus. The coughing continued for several hours. As night gathered around the lake, a sweaty, feverish Kutluk fell into delirium; he imagined he saw people hanging by their tongues from trees of fire, burning in furnaces, smothering in foul-smelling smoke, being swallowed by monstrous fish, gnawed by demons, and bitten by serpents. The next morning, while Kutluk was reliving the terrible dream, the cough returned -- this time even more fiercely. By early afternoon, Kutluk's lips and chin had become caked with blood, and the inside of his chest felt as if it had been seared by a hot iron. That night, while Magnu-Kelka was sponging Kutluk, the tumor on his groin gurgled.

For a moment Magnu-Kelka wondered if the swelling were alive; quickly, she made the sign of the cross. On the fourth day of his illness, Kutluk stained his straw bed with a bloody anal leakage, but Magnu-Kelka failed to notice. After vomiting twice in the morning, she slept until dark. When she awoke again, it was to the sound of crickets chirping in the evening darkness; she listened for a moment, then vomited on herself. On the fifth day of his illness, Kutluk was near death. All day Magnu-Kelka lay on a straw mat on the other side of the cottage, listening to her husband's hacking cough and breathing in the fetid air. Toward evening Kutluk made a strange rattling sound in his throat and the cottage fell silent.

As Magnu-Kelka gazed at her husband's still body, she felt an odd sensation -- like the fluttering of butterfly wings against the inside of her chest. A moment later, she began to cough. (41)

("The Glass-works temporary hospital during 1894 Hong Kong bubonic plague" Source)

Eczema Vaccinatum

Coffee flavored cream, crunching altoids, listening to Ed Alleyne-Johnson, reading the CDC website. What a lovely Sunday...

Anyway, this raised an eyebrow. Apparently if one has eczema (I do) one should not get the smallpox vaccination in non-emergency situations because of the risk of developing this rare but life-threatening condition. Filing under Good To Know.







Further Reading: Finding May Help Eczema Sufferers Tolerate Smallpox Vaccine

CDC Page

Smallpox: A Digital Guide

Disaster & Recovery

Referenced in TGM, "Disaster & Recovery: The Black Death in Western Europe", the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission study on thermonuclear war.

Apparently, the center might hold. But color me skeptical.

Also, one of the most daunting things about this reading is the geography. First couple of chapters are very heavy with it. I'm stupid about this stuff and was prepared to just ignore it but there are all these handy pictures available on Google Images.

The Great Mortality

Currently reading -- The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, John Kelly



Captivating, brilliantly written, poetically gruesome, gruesomely poetic. Very detailed account of what we call the Black Death. Not just the spread, the symptoms and devastation it wrought but the preface. This is the really fascinating part, what were the things that led up to the Plague. These things that might've contributed to susceptibility and turned epi into pan(demic). It's not just the usual suspects like superstition or sanitation, some of it came as quite a surprise to me.

And what's really tilting my head is seeing parallels to those precursors today, every day. Makes me think something bad is on its way. "We see death coming into our midst like black smoke," a Welsh poet wrote, "a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance."

But I'll get to that. Need to log some stuff as I go. Quotes, some miscellaneous references, photos, etc. Following from the book:

That night there is a splash off the aft side of the ship, then a second; no one raises an alarm as the bodies sink below the surface in a cone of rippling moonlight.

As the days lengthen and the disease takes hold, men begin to turn on one another, as they will later in Europe, when the plague arrives. There are beatings, murders, summary executions, mutinies; only the progress of the pestilence prevents complete anarchy. Men become to ill to kill, then to ill to work. A helmsman with a neck bubo is strapped to the helm; a ship's carpenter with a bloody cough, to his bench. A rigger shaking with fever is lashed to the mast.

Gradually each escaping vessel becomes a menagerie of grotesques. Everywhere there are delirious men who talk to the wind and stain their pants with bloody anal leakages; and weeping men who cry out for absent mothers and wives and children; and cursing men who blaspheme God, wave their fists at an indifferent sky, and burble blood when they cough. There are men who ooze pus from facial and body sores and stink to high heaven; lethargic men who stare listlessly into the cruel, grey sea; mad men who laugh hysterically and dig filthy fingernails into purple, mottled flesh; and dead men, whose bloated bodies roll back and forth across pitching decks until they hit a rail or mast and burst open like pinatas. (24)

(Photo from THIS article, description "a man who suffered bubonic plague during the outbreak in Algeria in 2003.")

Kelly writes:

The plague generation wrote about their experiences with a directness and urgency that, 700 years after the fact, retains the power to astonish, and haunt. After watching packs of wild dogs paw at the newly dug graves of the plague dead, a part-time tax collector in Siena wrote, “This is the end of the world.”

Starting Your Funeral Career

Via William the FuneralApprentice, Oklahoma-specific but some advice that probably applies to other states.



This is a great youtube channel, not a lot but what he has is really interesting.

Swamp People

I spent some formative years of young childhood in Ormond Beach, Florida. Rather undeveloped at the time, we were deep in an area best described as swamp land. I suspect that's why the History Channel series Swamp People caught my eye. I didn't know what to expect but ended up watching all of season 1 in one sitting.

Takes place in Louisiana. Love the accents, the focus on family/tradition and respect for the swamp. If asked earlier I would have said hunters kind of freak me out but these folks are just earning a living. Willie was my favorite, something really kick-ass and cute about him. I swear that cigarette must be growing out of his mouth, it is always there.

The show is not as annoying as this video. I let it load and then just skipped around:



Aside from the people the other awesome thing about this was the food. Accomplice and I got a real taste for Cajun cooking when we went to N'awlins in November. Red beans and rice, gumbo, jambalaya, lots of shrimp, crawfish, sausage and of course gator. Not too many restaurant choices here in Colorado but I did find Cajun Grocer online.