In 1998 a team of French scientists published a study demonstrating that the epidemic of infectious disease that struck Marseille in 1720--2, widely held at the time and ever since to be plague, was indeed plague.1 Two years later, the same team made a similar claim about the so-called Black Death, which spread over Europe between 1347 and 1353.2 Articles of this sort by various authors have continued to come out almost annually since 2000, always of course in scientific journals, but usually with a follow-up version in the popular press recast for a general audience. Neither the technical nor the popular versions have been offering much in the way of context, for example by showing how any one of the studies might relate to those reported previously. Attentive readers could thus well wonder what is so important about proving that past episodes of what was thought to be plague turn out to have been caused by plague; and wonder, too, whether each new article is not just more déjà lu. As we might expect, the scientific articles adhere to the traditions of sobriety and brevity characteristic of their genre. Even so, there is a current of competitiveness that simmers just below the surface of some of them and occasionally boils over. In addition the entire enterprise has come under strong criticism by a few persons in outside yet related fields, and since most of the authors of the scientific articles in question have responded to their critics only sporadically, readers may also have been left wondering what lies behind the tensions they perceive. The appearance of two articles in the autumn of 2010 brought a welcome break from this pattern. The first is the work of twelve authors representing seven countries --- France, Germany, Ireand, Italy, Madagascar, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom --- and it does indeed claim to `demonstrate unambiguously' that the plague pathogen was what caused the Black Death.3 However, it also lays out clearly the issues that underlie all this research and acknowledges both those who have been carrying it out and their critics. The other recent article, which lists twenty-four authors (from China, France, Germany, Ireland, Madagascar, the UK and the USA), marks the first attempt to trace the outline of the entire genetic history of plague.4 Given this change of tone as well as the broad scope of both these studies, which may signal the dawning of consensus, the moment seems particularly opportune to take stock of these rapidly changing developments in our understanding of plague's lengthy history
...MoreDescription Review of two scientific journal articles that seek to demonstrate difinitively that the Black Death was caused by the plague pathogen.
Article
Kean, Sam;
(2012)
Retrodiagnoses: Investigating the Ills of Long-Dead Celebrities
(/isis/citation/CBB001320462/)
Book
Scott, Susan;
Duncan, Christopher J.;
(2004)
Return of the Black Death: The World's Greatest Serial Killer
(/isis/citation/CBB000630801/)
Book
Benedictow, Ole Jørgen;
(2010)
What Disease Was Plague? On the Controversy over the Microbiological Identity of Plague Epidemics of the Past
(/isis/citation/CBB001214558/)
Book
Scott, Susan;
Duncan, C J.;
(2001)
Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations
(/isis/citation/CBB000101918/)
Thesis
Bowers, Neil Thomas;
(2006)
A Historical Discourse Analysis of the Cancerous and Non-Cancerous Body in Secondary Biology Textbooks
(/isis/citation/CBB001560997/)
Article
García Ferrandis, Xavier;
(2013)
Epidemiological and Care Aspects of Tuberculosis in Valencia during the Spanish Civil War and the Immediate Postwar Period (1936-1941)
(/isis/citation/CBB001200191/)
Book
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen;
(2003)
World Epidemics: A Cultural Chronology of Disease from Prehistory to the Era of SARS
(/isis/citation/CBB000471046/)
Book
Luigi Ingaliso;
(2017)
L'epidemiologia di Giovan Filippo Ingrassia
(/isis/citation/CBB981280626/)
Book
Kohn, George Childs;
(2001)
Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence: From Ancient Times to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB000101735/)
Book
Emanuele Stolfi;
(2022)
Come si racconta un'epidemia: Tucidide e altre storie
(/isis/citation/CBB569097952/)
Article
Wallis, Patrick;
(2006)
A Dreadful Heritage: Interpreting Epidemic Disease at Eyam, 1666--2000
(/isis/citation/CBB000670540/)
Book
Nükhet Varlik;
(2015)
Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600
(/isis/citation/CBB948772983/)
Article
Mirko Traversari;
Diletta Biagini;
Giancarlo Cerasoli;
Raffaele Gaeta;
Donata Luiselli;
Giorgio Gruppioni;
Elisabetta Cilli;
(2019)
The Plague of 1630 in Modena (Italy) through the Study of Parish Registers
(/isis/citation/CBB664087657/)
Chapter
Alessandra Celati;
(2021)
The Experience of the Physician Girolamo Donzellini in the 1575 Venetian Plague: Between Scientia and Heterodoxy
(/isis/citation/CBB221751862/)
Book
Cohn, Samuel K., Jr.;
(2010)
Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance
(/isis/citation/CBB001034238/)
Chapter
Christos Lynteris;
(2014)
Jean-Jacques Matignon’s Legacy on Russian Plague Research in North-East China and Inner Asia (1898-1910)
(/isis/citation/CBB748074120/)
Article
Theilmann, John;
(2007)
A Plague of Plagues: The Problem of Plague Diagnosis in Medieval England
(/isis/citation/CBB001030424/)
Article
Ka-wai Fan;
(2022)
The “Two Camps” Competition: the 1894 Hong Kong Plague in Two English Medical Journals
(/isis/citation/CBB815066885/)
Book
Costanza Geddes da Filicaia;
Marco Geddes da Filicaia;
(2015)
Peste: Il ‘flagello di Dio’ fra letteratura e scienza
(/isis/citation/CBB178325117/)
Chapter
Elisabeth Moreau;
(2021)
Pestilence in Renaissance Platonic Medicine: From Astral Causation to Pharmacology and Treatment
(/isis/citation/CBB328950141/)
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