The example of HIV suggests to Herlihy that new infectious agents can appear apparently out of nowhere and can also disappear, leaving open the possibility that the agent of the Black Death may not be known to us now.
He suggests that rare mutant forms of plague are also consistent with the evidence. Herlihy does not consider the historical evidence so far assembled to be decisive, and I agree. Miraculous survivals may have selectively favored people not in fact infected by fatal diseases. Whether the symptoms of people who were miraculously cured should be taken as representative of the symptoms of the people who died of the plague-whatever it was-is not a question that Herlihy addresses. 2 While some depositions mentioned the buboes, or characteristic lymph node swellings of bubonic plague, Herlihy points out that the “sign of the plague” frequently referred to in these trials is described as petechiae, or spots, characteristic of anthrax and some other diseases (but rare with bubonic plague). The proceedings of many of these trials were collected in Acta Sanctorum, a seventy-volume hagiographic collection published in Antwerp starting in 1643. In trials conducted and carefully documented by the Church, petitioners described the medical afflictions that were alleged to have been miraculously cured. In the aftermath of the plague, the Church received many petitions to canonize persons who were said to have miraculously cured cases of the plague. In his short, sweeping, and brilliant book 1 the late historian David Herlihy brings new information from a most unlikely source to bear on the identification of the infectious agent of the Black Death. Sometimes plague is transmitted from person to person by airborne droplets, and an initial epizootic among rodents could have passed unrecorded. Still, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
On these grounds, more than one historian has challenged the identification of the Black Death as bubonic plague. But no contemporary account mentions a lethal outbreak of mortal disease (or epizootic) among rodents during the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
The fleas that transmitted the infection among rats would then have been forced to abandon the cold bodies of their former rodent hosts and would have settled on the people who fed and sheltered the rats. But if the disease had been bubonic plague, then outbreaks in the human population should have been preceded by extensive deaths among local rodents. What was the infectious agent of the Black Death that struck Europe in 1348 and succeeding decades? The classical answer is Yersinia pestis, today’s bubonic plague.
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