Almost twenty-five centuries have passed since then, but mankind, perhaps, has not experienced such a terrible time. Europe was then gripped by terrible natural disasters: violent earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, famine. And to top it off, an epidemic of some strange and terrible disease came from Asia Minor.
Deadly attack
The ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote about this disease: “People were struck by it suddenly, in the midst of full health. First, there was intense fever and inflammation of the eyes, the tongue became blood-red, breathing was heavy. Soon the disease descended to the chest and was accompanied by a severe cough. The body acquired a bluish-purple hue and covered with purulent abscesses. After seven to eight days, many of the sick died."
It is believed that it was a plague epidemic. Not a single disease drove as many people to the grave as the plague, the “black death,” as the people called it. She terrified people, destroyed entire cities, sowed decay and ruin around.
Scientists have calculated that over the past centuries, mankind has experienced more than eighty strongest plague epidemics. The most devastating of these erupted about six hundred and fifty years ago. The plague passed through many countries of Europe and Asia. She did not spare anyone - neither the poor, nor the rich, not the commoners, not the kings. In the countries seized by this deadly scourge, more than 25 million people went to the grave then! Nobody knew how to escape the "black death". Prayers, fasts, even strict quarantine - all were in vain.
The "black death" and Russia did not pass. Nine centuries ago in Kiev, according to the chronicler, in two weeks at least seven thousand people died from a terrible plague! More than once the plague devastated Moscow, Smolensk, Chernigov. In ancient Pskov and Novgorod, she killed two-thirds of the inhabitants, and in smaller cities the population died out almost without exception.
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Approaching the mystery
In one ancient chronicle after the plague invasion, it is written: "It was impossible to find anyone who would have buried the dead - neither for friendship, nor for money." People stopped sowing and harvesting. Livestock died. And packs of hungry wolves prowled the streets of the deserted cities.
And much later, about 150 years ago, the "black death" was still visiting Russia. Then she calmed down, and it seemed that she was gone forever. One St. Petersburg professor in 1874 even declared loudly: "In our time, a Russian person must be a horned cattle or a pig in order to get sick with such a disease as the plague at the present time of the triumph of medicine."
But just four years after these words were uttered, the plague again appeared on Russian soil - in one of the Cossack villages. Almost all the doctors who came to the rescue contracted the plague and died. Panic arose among the population of those places. And then they remembered that one of the first to die of the plague was an old man who was known here as a sorcerer, that, dying, he seemed to predict imminent death for everyone. To remove the curse, it was decided to dig a coffin and drive an aspen stake into it. And so they did. Alas, this only contributed to the spread of the infection.
Risky experiences
In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte launched a military campaign against the British in Egypt. In the fortress-city of Alexandria besieged by French troops, a plague epidemic broke out. And in this city the English physician A. White conducted a desperately daring experiment.
In the hospital where he worked, there was a woman with bubonic plague. The brave doctor took a little pus from the bubo of this patient's plague abscess and rubbed it into his left thigh. The next day, White repeated the insane experience, while amplifying it. He made an incision on his right forearm and injected pus into the wound. White soon fell ill with the plague and died in agony on the eighth day.
It would seem that the tragic death of an English doctor will forever scare others away from such deadly experiments. But no! Thirty-six years passed, and another doctor, this time the Frenchman A. Bular, did something similar on himself at a desperate risk. He later recalled: “On May 15, 1834, I took off all my clothes and, without taking any precautions or protective equipment, put on the shirt of a man suffering from a severe form of the plague. This shirt still retained the warmth of someone else's body and was covered in blood. I walked and slept in it for two days without feeling any signs of illness."
Indeed, Bularoo was surprisingly lucky. He never fell ill with the plague, thus proving that the "black death" does not always pass from a sick person to a healthy one.
Experiments continue
By the way, this doctor suggested that the French Commission for the Fight against Plague conduct dangerous experiments on criminals sentenced to death, of course, volunteers, with the promise of pardon. And the plague was indeed vaccinated on five suicide bombers. Of these, only one died. Four survived and were pardoned.
Bulard found a follower, his compatriot, 27-year-old doctor Antoine Clot. At the risk of his life, he also decided to prove on himself that not everyone gets the plague, even during an epidemic, and thereby calm the population. Clot continued the experience of Bulard, but at the same time went much further than his predecessor.
He scraped some dried blood and pus from the shirt of the plague patient and inoculated six places on his body. Moreover, he covered all the wounds with bandages dipped in the patient's blood. However, this was not enough for the desperate doctor. He cut the skin on his arm and injected pus from a plague boil into the wound. Then he put on the clothes of the sick person, and when he soon died, he went to his bed. In a word, Clot did his best to certainly get sick with a terrible disease, but a miracle happened again: he did not get sick!
On this, the doctors' experiments did not end on themselves, they continued and often ended tragically. Austrian physician A. Rosenfeld set out to test a remedy against the "black death". Recipes for drugs supposedly protecting against the plague (at that time its causative agent was not yet known) existed both in Europe and in the East.
Life-saving vaccine
In those days, an anti-plague "medicine" was strongly recommended, composed of dried glands and bone powder of people who died of the plague. This mixture, taken internally, was thought to act as a vaccine. Rosenfeld decided to test its effect on himself.
He conducted his experiment in one of the hospitals in Constantinople. Rosenfeld took the "healing" powder and lay down on a bed among two dozen plague patients. Days passed, and the prover remained alive and well, although every day in his ward one of the patients died. Then Rosenfeld decided to tighten the experience. He rubbed his skin on his thigh several times with pus taken from the plague boils and waited for the consequences.
For six weeks Rosenfeld was among the plague patients, and nothing bad happened to him. He was about to leave the room, confident that the experiment was a success and, therefore, the remedy is indeed effective, when suddenly he began to show ominous signs of the plague. The doctor's condition became worse and worse, and after a few days of suffering he died.
Only in 1894 was it possible to finally discover the causative agent of the plague - the plague stick. The hope of victory over the "black death" dawned on the horizon. It turned out that rats spread the plague, but not directly, but through fleas. And since the pathogen became known, then a vaccine against a terrible disease appeared. It was created and first tested by the Russian doctor Vladimir Khavkin, who worked in India. Khavkin's vaccine saved more than one million human lives from death.
And yet the plague on Earth has not yet been exterminated. The "Black Death" only lurked like a wounded animal. People still continue to die from it.
G. Chernenko. Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" No. 21 2008