When fears are mentioned, it can be explained as the state of anxiety that develops against the existence of a real danger or its realization. People are afraid of dozens of things, examples such as darkness, height, closed space can be given. Throughout human history, fears have been used for all kinds of purposes, both personal and social. Even in wars, there are dozens of ways to create fear, such as making noise, lighting a fire at night more than the number of people and cheating in numbers.
Well, have you ever seen someone die from darkness?
If attention is paid, people are most afraid not when they see, but when they cannot see. Some causes of fear are invisible. However, when we see the effect, destruction and destruction it creates around us, we begin to fear.
Before the industrial revolution and the advent of medicine (including sanitary sewer systems and sanitary conditions), humans were exposed to many different microbes, many of them fatal. Especially since the 1900s, these developments have been experienced. Apart from how healthy he was, the world population in 1900 was 1782 million (one billion seven hundred and eighty two million). In 118 years, this number has reached almost 7 billion. Considering the development of human history in millions of years, it can be thought that the increase in the last century is completely dependent on the health system and protection from diseases. Easy access to food and clean drinking water is another reason.
Without getting too far from the subject, I would like to introduce you to the most cruel, brutal, ruthless killer of history, whose name people fear the most without knowing his name:
Yersinia Pestis.
Yersinia is a Gram Negative bacterium. It has caused 3 major pandemics in the history of the world. This bacterium is sensitive to sunlight and disinfectants. However, it loves dark and especially moist rodent burrows. In order to cause disease in humans, a flea that sucks the blood of a rodent must suck the blood of a human. In other words, rodents are intermediate hosts. The main transmission is through fleas.
After infecting humans, it goes to the lymph nodes, settles and causes an inflammatory reaction. It causes disseminated intravascular blood clots and is usually fatal if left untreated. It has 3 subtypes. Bubonic plague, septicemic and pneumonic. The type seen in pandemics is bubonic plague.
The cause of the disease is not known exactly. However, there are various theories. The first is that the Tatars, who wanted to seize the Genoese colony of Caffa in the Caucasus, threw the plagued dead inside the walls to break the resistance in the castle. Many historians accept this as the cause of the plague epidemic.
The people of that period generally believed that God punished bad people. According to the German natural philosopher Albert do Cologne, this event was a natural disaster caused by Jupiter Mars and Saturn converging.
One of the biggest known plague epidemics, the plague (black death/black death/peste noir) epidemic, which started in Egypt in 1347, spread to Europe from Mediterranean ports via ships, villages and cities were wiped from the map as a result of mass deaths and 10 60 million people (one third of Europe) died annually, 75 million people were affected by the disease. There is no exact information as to the number, but historians have concluded that one third of the European continent was affected by this epidemic.
The map shows that the 1st plague epidemic started in Italy and progressed to the Norwegian coast. However, the plague did not cause many deaths in Norway. In Italy, the place where the plague first appeared and perhaps the most damaging, official orders have buried the belongings and beds of plague victims, their homes disinfected with smoke and cleaned with vinegar. Health committees organized mass funerals outside the city.
Physicians have to take more precautions because they are more likely to contract the disease, and they usually wear shirts and gloves, and nasal bags moistened with cinnamon and herbs.
The Black Death not only caused death but also affected human life in many different ways. Although most of the deaths were from the poor, it was affected by the deaths in the aristocratic segment.
Also, according to Plague Historian Robert Gottfied, “Without the Black Death, Europe would have turned into a dusty and treeless Ethiopia”. It means. With few exceptions, the great forests of Europe emerged after the plague epidemic.
It is ironic that an invisible microbe caused the events that changed the history of humanity, perhaps on a continent. Hitler could conquer Russia that Napoleon could not, 2. We talked about a mini-killer who killed many more people than in World War II.
