LESSON 3.15 How did people respond to the Black Death?
LEARNING INTENTION By the end of this lesson you should be able to: • identify medieval treatments for the Black Death and explain why they were not effective • explain the religious responses to the Black Death in the Middle Ages.
Tune in In the SOURCE1 engraving people are escaping from their village after setting the buildings on fire. The woman on the left appears to be performing the last rites for a plague-infected man. The world was caught by surprise when COVID-19 began to spread. Why were we so unprepared for this situation if it had happened before? 1. Discuss why people may have turned to religion in the face of the Black Death. 2. Brainstorm the public response to COVID-19. How did people react to this pandemic? 3. Compare the reactions in both times. Identify any similarities and differences.
SOURCE1 A fourteenth-century English engraving
3.15.1
Medical treatments
The strength and speed of the Black Death pandemic caught everyone in its path off guard. Medical science had no way of dealing with the outbreak and religious beliefs provided no protection against the onslaught. Medieval doctors had no idea what had caused the Black Death and so they resorted to the traditional methods of treating illness. Bloodletting and the use of leeches were tried and failed to cure the disease. Attempts to cut into the buboes to remove the ‘bad’ blood often did little more than help spread the disease by exposing the doctors to the bacteria living in the blood. A common belief in Europe was that disease came from miasma , or thebad smells that were often found in overcrowded towns. To counter this, doctors often encouraged their patients to sniff posies of fragrant flowers, bundles of herbs or sweet-smelling oils. In some cases, they even suggested that patients should breathe in the smell of human waste in the hope that one bad smell might overcome the more dangerous miasma.
SkillBuilder discussion Using historical sources 1. The writer compares the buboes (swellings) to two different food items. What are they, and why do you think these comparisons would help medieval readers understand what the buboes looked like? 2. List the words that the writer uses to show how painful these symptoms were for victims. 3. Looking at the date when this was written (1349), what does this Welsh account tell us about how far and how quickly the Black Death had spread across Europe after it first arrived in 1347?
TOPIC3 Medieval Europe 99
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