The Decameron And The Black Death

When the rags of a poor man who died of this disease were thrown into the public street, two pigs came upon them, as they are wont to do, and first with their snouts and then with their teeth they took the rags and shook them around; and within a short time, after a number of convulsions, both pigs fell dead upon the ill-fated rags, as if they had been poisoned (Boccaccio, p. 323). The Black Death plague began in Central Asia and ravaged through China, Mongolia, northern India and the Middle East, through the trade routes during the 1330s and 1340s. Giovanni Boccaccio was a writer and poet from Florence; his work The Decameron became quite famous and in Perspectives from the Past, Primary Source in Western Civilizations, the Introduction of this piece is included. The Decameron meaning, ten days, tells of seven women and three men who flee Florence to …show more content…
Sadly, when it appeared in the 1300’s no one knew what caused it, how to treat it or how to stop it. In 2011, scientists were able to confirm that it can be traced to the deadly microbe Yersiniapestis, and that it did indeed originate in China (Cole and Symes, 2010, p. 353). Boccaccio mentions that he believes the disease started in the East, because of God’s just wrath as a punishment to mortals for our wicked deeds. However, as scientists later discovered the bacteria is one that gets stuck in a flea’s digestive tract. As it enlarges fleas begin to starve and to try and fight their own death from starvation they jump from rat to rat biting them, trying to survive. The blockage prohibits the rat from becoming able to swallow the blood. The fleas in turn vomit the blood along with the bacteria, which ends up in the rat’s blood stream. The rats then either bite humans or, fleas find humans to be their new hosts; that is what created this endemic that killed so many people (Man and