Rats and Plague

Abstract

ALTHOUGH the recent epidemics of bubonic plague in China, India, and other parts of the world have been always associated with outbreaks of the same disease amongst rats, the historical study of plague throughout the world reveals the singular fact that previous to 1800 very few references to a coincident mortality amongst rats have been put on record. Many excellent accounts of the older outbreaks, notably of the Black Death in Europe in 1347, arid the Great Plague of London in 1665, are in existence, but careful research into these documents by modern historiographers—Haeser, Hirsch, Abel, and Sticker—has shown that for reasons difficult to discover very scanty mention of associated rat mortality has been made.