Whenever a new disease, plague, epidemic or even pandemic makes the rounds, society plays out the same story. Whether it is the corona virus, its now somewhat old-fashioned relative SARS, swine flu or bird flu … the process is now well known. Panic for a while (sometimes more appropriate, sometimes less) and then people often forget the topic again or learn to live with it. But the time of panic can be tough and it usually doesn't take long for the first Schurbler to draw parallels from the current illness to the worst epidemics in history. The fact that diseases such as SARS, coronavirus and Co., despite everything, do not play in the league of the mentioned pandemics in history is swept under the carpet. That's why today we devote ourselves to a list of the greatest plagues in world history! I can assure you of one thing:everything used to be worse.
The plague in the Middle Ages and after
The typical picture of diseases and pandemics in history is still strongly influenced today by a very specific plague:the plague of the Middle Ages. Or to be even more specific:The bubonic plague of the 14th century, known to this day as the Black Death. Because with some probability this was not the first outbreak of the plague in Europe, just as little as it was the last. Even before the Middle Ages, this pathogen existed and was well known to us humans. It raged in Constantinople as the Justinian plague in the 6th century, and there may have been an outbreak in Rome before that. But the plague of 1347 was something different. Within a few months, the epidemic spread across Europe and eventually wiped out a good third of the population. A completely crazy idea...
At that time, of course, people knew nothing about the origin or possible treatment of this plague. The course of the disease was correspondingly devastating. Reports say death could come just days after symptoms and the notorious plague bubs appeared. In this context, it is not surprising that the people of the time understood the plague as a punishment from God. The plague couldn't be treated medically anyway, so people responded with prayers, masses and processions. This in turn had the devastating effect that large crowds of people were now more targeted and the virus was carried further. After all, nobody knew that the plague was transmitted from person to person (although of course people suspected it). It took almost four years for this, the greatest wave of plague in history, to come to an end. However, the disease kept coming back in modern times. Larger outbreaks still occurred in Central Europe in the 18th century, although fortunately never again on the scale of that time.
Smallpox:the scourge of modernity
In the period after the plague, the world regularly experienced new epidemics:In the 16th century, syphilis, imported from America, came to the old continent, followed a little later by tuberculosis or consumption and cholera. The list could go on almost endlessly, but I want to talk about a particularly deadly modern-day disease:smallpox. They were such a part of everyday life in Europe that almost everyone fell ill with them at some point in their lives. About a third of those infected also died from smallpox, leaving many others with lifelong scars on their faces and entire bodies. Smallpox remained a normal part of life well into the 19th century, until a smallpox vaccine (and thus the first modern vaccine ever) was invented at the beginning of the century and curbed the recurring epidemics. The colleagues from the Zeitsprung podcast have already talked about this in detail.
However, smallpox did not show its deadliest effects in Europe anyway, but in newly “discovered” America. The Spaniards and other Europeans, who invaded there en masse from the 16th century onwards, had, as I said, mostly already had smallpox behind them. So they were largely immune to the disease. You couldn't say the same about Native Americans. They were almost wiped out by the plague over the next few decades. According to estimates, the indigenous population fell by 90 percent in the first 100 years after initial contact with the virus! It is all the nicer to know that smallpox has officially been extinct since 1980. The pathogen is still found in only two laboratories worldwide. One in the US and one in Russia. And yes, I know... horror movies start with a sentence like that.
The Spanish Flu of 1918
In the context of swine flu, avian flu SARS and coronavirus, parallels are usually drawn today to a different pandemic than the plague or smallpox:the Spanish flu of 1918. It rolled across the globe in three waves and killed up to 50 million people. This was probably the deadliest pandemic in known European history since the plague. In and of itself, this was not an exceptional illness. The Spanish flu was a "normal" flu caused by an influenza pathogen. Why this variant was so unusually deadly has only been partially clarified to this day. However, the ongoing First World War and the associated poor hygiene conditions and cramped spaces in trenches and prison camps certainly played a role. One of the symptoms of the Spanish flu was that it attacked the airways, often resulting in pneumonia that often killed those affected. The inflammation simply could not be treated in the often desolate circumstances of the time.
It is still not possible to say with certainty where the Spanish flu actually started. It definitely wasn't in Spain. The country only had the “bad luck” of not being involved in the world war and therefore not being subject to any blackouts or censorship. As a result, Spanish media reported on the new epidemic, while the information was kept secret in Germany or Great Britain, for example. The old adage "Don't shoot the messenger" didn't go down well with anyone. The disease was soon known around the world as Spanish flu. However, we now know the first diagnosed patient. He was an American soldier at a boot camp in Kansas. But there are also theories that the flu had previously spread to China. As always, you can't say for sure, but at least it wouldn't be unusual. In any case, Asia was hit much harder by the Spanish flu than Europe or America. Most of the victims were in India and China was also badly affected. Even after 1918, there were always new influenza outbreaks in Asia with millions of deaths, such as the Asian flu of 1957. This also claimed almost 30,000 lives in Germany, which, interestingly enough, is hardly known today.
From local plague to pandemic
However, one thing has changed radically in the last few centuries:our knowledge and classification of such plagues. It is no longer that of the Middle Ages. In the case of the Spanish flu of 1918, there was no longer much talk of a "punishment from God" because, after all, microbial pathogens were now known. Ever since Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch revealed the nature of bacteria towards the end of the 19th century, mankind had developed completely new ways of classifying and sometimes treating such diseases. If influenza had only been a bacterium, a cure might even have been found... Unfortunately, however, it is transmitted by a virus and what exactly that is was only researched in the 1930s. It was too late for millions of dead.
All in all, however, all the diseases mentioned here are much easier to control today than they were a hundred years ago. In essence, the problem has even turned completely. In the past it was still the case that illnesses could quickly become fatal for the people affected. So the mortality rate was extremely high. On the other hand, plagues spread much more slowly, apart from sensational exceptions such as the plague in the Middle Ages. People just traveled far less and at far slower speeds. By air travel, on the other hand, diseases such as the corona virus can now reach the whole world in a few days. For this we read of mortality rates well below the 35% of the plague. And I prefer that.