What Disease was Plague? On the Controversy over the Microbiological Identity of Plague Epidemics of the Past, by Ole J. Benedictow

Abstract

Beware of the Black Death! Students of plague are no strangers to controversy: the subject remains highly popular among varied constituencies including universities, the press, television producers and audiences. There are myriad debates and fiercely-held opinions. Was the Black Death of 1346–53, and subsequent plagues, the precursor of enclosure and of Reformation? Or was the plague which recurred from the 1340s to the 1720s the second of three ‘pandemics’—the first being the one known as the plague of Justinian, and the third that which began in the Far East c.1890 and petered out in Felixstowe, Glasgow, and Liverpool? Among historians of demography (Benedictow is one of these), economy, and mentalité, debates continue about the scale of mortality and why populations continued to decline after 1350, when recovery might have been predicted. Ole Benedictow’s important new book of 746 pages of close argument refutes a generation of critics of the theory with which historians of a certain age grew up—namely that the Black Death in particular, and plague in general, was spread by rats and fleas. In seeking to refute revisionism, Benedictow takes readers back to basics: observations by those who , amidst that Far Eastern epidemic, identified the plague bacillus in the 1890s—the Japanese Kitasato and the Swiss student of Pasteur, Yersin. Such first-hand information, whether from more recent scholars who solved the mystery of the nature of historic plague, or medieval witness-accounts, form the core of this book. However, many of those who unravelled the mysteries of plague more than a century ago and set in place the bubonic view of plague, are now dead. Benedictow’s book is ‘not a work of intellectual love, but of scholarly duty’ to uphold ‘the life work of a large number of fine and dedicated medical and historical scholars, many of whom cannot rise from their graves to defend themselves’—an ‘ethical duty’ embarked on ‘very reluctantly’ (p. xv). Why?