Head to Head
What's the worst ancient disease? I Google'd "Butt Rot" but nothing (helpful) came up.
Dominick Mayer
As ancient pandemics go, discussion often begins and ends with the Bubonic plague. That hog of the spotlight killed a few thousand people, and suddenly, everybody spent the next few centuries scared of things like rats and not washing your hands before you go out wearing your "Free Handshakes" sign. You know, the one somebody who's not enough of a pussy for those "Free Hugs" shirts wears out on a Saturday night. Anyway, I'm here today to make you aware of another malady, forgotten in the annals of history, that is the Little Mac to the Black Death's Mike Tyson. This scrappy underdog threw down on the Athenians and Spartans alike, and yet isn't even as well known as that virus of impeccably ripped abs that history texts have shown the Spartans to possess.
This would be the Peloponnesian War Pestilence. In addition to being the best name for a grindcore band in history, the PWP caused the body to overheat, the eyes to swell and turn red, and the throat and tongue to bleed and secrete a foul-smelling odor. Later, they would encounter different symptoms ranging from diarrhea to skin ulcers, and the plague usually ended with death, the loss of extremities or survival and thus the right to walk the earth as the toughest fucking person alive. Now, see, the PWP knew how to do work, and do it ably. It wiped out a majority of the Athenian population (estimations put the death toll at somewhere around 30K), and those who didn't die were pretty much just shitting blood. (Man, 2 for 2 on the grindcore band names today.) This would be the worst to contract of the ancient pandemics, because really, at least with the Bubonic plague you knew you were dead from the get go. With the PWP, death was a swift end, and more likely you were just going to walk around looking like a tick about to pop. Any plague that makes a swift demise the most desirable option is definitely no plague of mine.
Also, No Plague Of Mine is trademarked for my other band. So back the hell off.
Ryan Peters
I’ve written about the Bubonic Plague before, but Dominick is right that it’s a selfish, spotlight-hogging disease that likes to brag about how it killed 60% of Europe’s population in the 14th Century. BFD. People always go big sexy for the diseases with the flashy stats. They talk about them a lot. Study and celebrate them, and then before you know it, the diseases are taking their talents to South Beach this fall.
Wha..?
It’s important to remember that their were a lot of diseases that ran rampant in the Middle Ages that didn’t neccesarily decimate half the population, but still commenced to fuck up everyday life. One such disease would be ergotism, which in the Medieval period went by the much cooler moniker St. Anthony’s Fire (which, incidentally, was also the name of my 80s synth-rock band). Ergotism is a type of poisoning that comes from the Ergot fungus, which grows on grains. The fungus apparently *loves* wheat and rye, both of which are used in the bread making process, and bread was, you know, kind of important in the Middle Ages.
Ergotism constricts blood flow and gives its victims horrible convulsive seizures, diarrhea, vomiting and bleeding. So it wasn’t uncommon to see rural Medieval peoples writhing in a field with bloody stool and vomit.* Oh, and it also causes gangrene, which makes parts of your body fester, wilt, and eventually fall off. NO BIG DEAL OR ANYTHING.
Medieval Church officials named it St. Anthony’s Fire because they believed saints were assigned to combat problems on earth, and they were always giving the shitty ones to lesser known saints. Doctors at the time also thought that it caused uncontrollable madness, but they also thought the same thing about the moon (<--not joking), so don’t trust a thing they say. Doctors today think that sufferers of ergotism were in so much pain that they spasmed and writhed constantly, thus appearing to be crazy and/or to be listening to the new #bieber song.
It’s hard to get official numbers on how many people were infected, but suffice to say that it was a lot. And it scared the pee out of people at the time. So much so, that they made scary paintings about it. ::Shudder::
*This is also not that uncommon in my back alley.
Posted by Ryan Peters on Aug 25, 2010 @ 11:11 am