History Main / TheBlackDeath

!!As a DeathTrope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

[[folder:Anime]]

* In the AlternateHistory novel ''Literature/TheYearsOfRiceAndSalt'', the Black Death causes the extinction of Western civilization.

The pathogen ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis Yersinia pestis]]'', originating from Central Asia, has caused some of the deadliest pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between [[TheLateMiddleAges 1346 and 1353]] in the Great Pestilence with strains continuing until the 1700s. Both the event and the disease are also known by the name given by later writers, the Black Death. Experienced by the whole of Eurasian/Mediterranean civilization to some degree, it so traumatized the human race that the formal name the disease was given in UsefulNotes/{{Europe}}, derived from the Latin words for ''to strike down'', and ''to lament''[[note]]''plaga'' and ''plangere'' respectively[[/note]], is to this day synonymous with both "widespread threat to society" and "lethal contagious disease": ThePlague. It's believed that an outright majority of Europe and Asia's population was killed by this outbreak. In terms of absolute numbers, with anywhere between 75 million and 200 million deaths, it was the absolute deadliest pandemic ever recorded and proportionally ''the single deadliest event in recorded history.''

Keep in mind that the disease is not called the "bubonic plague"; it's simply "plague". "Bubonic" is merely one way the disease plays out: by infecting the lymph system and colonizing the lymph nodes, which swell up into "bubos". In coastal areas, the most common form of plague at that time was pneumonic plague, which affects the lungs. Septicemic plague affects the bloodstream. The difference? Pneumonic plague kills all but a handful of sufferers, mostly within a week of the first symptoms. Septicemic plague is always fatal and can kill within hours of the first symptoms appearing, or sometimes even ''before any symptoms occur''. [[note]]Even with the intervention of modern medicine within the first 24 hours, the survival rate only goes up to 4-15%.[[/note]] Bubonic plague victims, on the other hand, can take days or even weeks to die, and around one-third actually ''survive'' with long lasting traumatic damage to their internal organs and immune systems -- with the effect of making these victims the most noticeable and horrifying.

-->''Speaking epidemiologically, bubonic plague doesn't make sense to me.''
-->''Yersinia pestis gets you dead, it's true, but it isn't as effective as the common flu.''
-->''If you want to wipe out half of Europe's population, you'll need a better agent for your devastation;''
-->''You need a viral agent that is tried and tragic -- let's take a look at fevers that are hemorrhagic.''

* ''Series/{{NCIS}}''. Tony opens a letter and gets sprayed by a white powder that they naturally assume is anthrax, but it turns out to be weaponised ''Y. pestis''. There is no cure, but fortunately as a fit, well-nourished male with access to modern medical care Tony's chances of surviving are a lot better.

One of the things that made the plague so horrible is that there wasn't any escape. Most diseases spread from person to person and thus hit urban areas far harder than rural. People seeking to escape an epidemic could flee to the countryside. However, yersinia pestis is carried by rats, and rats are territorial such that their population density was uniform in medieval Europe and the plague was likewise uniform. Where other diseases were epidemic and the superstitious could blame them on moral decay in urban centers, the black death was pandemic and it could only have felt like the entire world was being condemned by heaven.

Keep in mind that the disease is not called the "bubonic plague"; it's simply "plague". "Bubonic" is merely one way the disease plays out: by infecting the lymph system and colonizing the lymph nodes, which swell up into "bubos". In coastal areas, the most common form of plague at that time was pneumonic plague, which affects the lungs. Septicemic plague affects the bloodstream. The difference? Pneumonic plague kills all but a handful of sufferers, mostly within a week of the first symptoms. Septicemic plague is always fatal and can kill within hours of the first symptoms appearing, or sometimes even ''before any symptoms occur''. [[note]]Even with the intervention of modern medicine within the first 24 hours, the survival rate only goes up to 4-15%.[[/note]] Bubonic plague victims, on the other hand, can take days or even weeks to die, and around one-third actually ''survive'' with long lasting traumatic damage to their internal organs and immune systems- with the effect of making these victims the most noticeable and horrifying.

The disturbing explanation for the disease's alternate name, the black death, is that in both the septisemic and bubonic presentations, the victims are left in a horrific swollen and decaying state due to a combination of ruptured lymph nodes and frostbite-like patches of black gangrene --''before they die''. Following the plague pandemic, this image was so burned into Europe's psyche that it spawned our modern visualization of TheUndead, a stark contrast to the prior depictions of liches and kin as [[LooksLikeCesare unusually pale but otherwise unremarkable]], [[LooksLikeOrlok animalistic]], or [[DemBones totally skeletal]].

* In ''ComicBook/Robin1993'' the biological weapon Edmund Dorrance gets his hands on is revealed to be the black death, which an old Nazi scientist had managed to recreate and which Dorrance somehow heard of and sent his hired help to go track down.