re: #10 ckkatz

Going back to the Pandemic Discussions of a couple of threads ago…

Back in the late 1970’s I read William O’Neill’s “Plagues and Peoples” which is about how infectious diseases affect history.

Since then I have read a bunch of fascinating accounts of how diseases have affected human history and how humans are responding.

For example, The Justinian Plague of 541CE is viewed as probably the first reported occurrence of the Bubonic plague. It is thought to have killed off between one-tenth and one-quarter of world’s human population.

The ramifications it had for the Europe are fascinating.

Plague of Justinian
en.wikipedia.org

TL;DR-

The plague may have prevented the Byzantine Empire from reuniting the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, from fighting off a series of invasions and possibly from fighting off the Arab Invasions. And it may have been the reason why the native Britons couldn’t fight off the Angle and Saxon invasions.

I’ll probably drop a few more stories as I get time…

the moral seems to be that history is always written by people with the most shit on them.