. Guide leaflet. in 542 A. D. and spread by way of the principaltrade routes of the time into Palestine and then to the rest of theknown world. Procopius says of this outbreak, of which he was a wit-ness It spared neither island nor cave nor mountain top where mandwelt. . Many houses were left empty and it came to pass that manyfrom want of relatives and servants lay unburied for several days. 51 AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS The second pandemic of plague, the Black Death of the MiddleAges, originated in Mesopotamia about the middle of the eleventhcentury. In the track of travel and commerce,
. Guide leaflet. in 542 A. D. and spread by way of the principaltrade routes of the time into Palestine and then to the rest of theknown world. Procopius says of this outbreak, of which he was a wit-ness It spared neither island nor cave nor mountain top where mandwelt. . Many houses were left empty and it came to pass that manyfrom want of relatives and servants lay unburied for several days. 51 AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS The second pandemic of plague, the Black Death of the MiddleAges, originated in Mesopotamia about the middle of the eleventhcentury. In the track of travel and commerce, particularly on theroute of the returning crusaders, it quickly spread to the West andNorth. It is said that 25,000,000 people, one fourth of the populationof Europe, perished of plague during the fourteenth century. A third pandemic of plague which is still going on at the presenttime (1918) broke out at Yunnan Fu in China in 1871 and attractedgeneral notice when it reached Hongkong in 1894. From this point. Fig. 28. MODEL OF CORNER OF RAT-INFESTED DWELLING American Museum of Natural History the disease made its way to India where it raged unchecked for tenyears and carried off 6,000,000 people. This time, however, theworld invasion of the Black Death was to be met by a new defensivemechanism, the organized force of scientific research. A Japanesebacteriologist, Yersin, discovered the bacillus of plague in 1894 andit was soon proved that the disease from which rats were simultane-ously suffering (as they had done in the days of Samuel) was thesame as the human plague. The infection may be more or lesschronic among the rodents, persisting among them for years as 52 INSECTS AND DISEASE tuberculosis infection does in man. At certain times and undercertain conditions, the disease becomes more virulent, the rats diein great numbers, and infection spreads to human beings. Theagent of transmission of the germ from rat to man and from man toman remained to be solved; and in 1897 and
Size: 1844px × 1355px
Photo credit: © Reading Room 2020 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectnatural, bookyear1901
