How was the black death spread?
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The most common theory is that it was Yersinia Pestis that lived in the flea Xenopsylla cheopis that live on rodents. When the sickness kills the host they flea seek other hosts. As the black rat (Rattus rattus) lived close to humans it would infect humans. Infected humans can spread it on by coughs, vomits and sneezes.
Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan published the theory that it may instead have been a type of viral haemorrhagic fever (ebola is probably the most known type).press release
Graham Twigg published The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (1984) that suggest that it would have been impossible for rats to spread the disease with such speed. He instead thinks it may have been anthrax. In In the Wake of the Plague (2001) by Norman F. Cantor he also suggests anthrax and cites finds from a mass grave in Scotland.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_the_Black_Death for further reading.
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Not only historians, but also medicaly one still only believes what type of bacteria was the cause of the Black death.
Black rats (which were immune) carried the fleas which themselves lived off the blood of their victims.
This blood contained the bacteria.
There are some opinions today that still have doubts about the exact cause
Your question is, if I have understood it correctly, asks what other ideas existed as to the possible cause.
The first Wikipedia artical states the following:
Medical knowledge had stagnated during the Middle Ages. The most authoritative account at the time came from the medical faculty in Paris in a report to the king of France that blamed the heavens, in the form of a conjunction of three planets in 1345 that caused a "great pestilence in the air". This report became the first and most widely circulated of a series of plague tracts that sought to give advice to sufferers. That the plague was caused by bad air became the most widely accepted theory. Today, this is known as the miasma theory.
Bad air was deemed the main cause of all illnesses, where the medical practitioners didn't have faintest clue of what the cause was.
In fiction, a good source for alternative ideas may be the book
- The Physician, by Noah Gordon
It is about the life of a Christian English boy in the 11th century who journeys across Europe in order to study medicine among the Persians.
I found this book (which starts in 1020) very interesting for 3 reasons
- how peaple lived and traveled in Europe at the time
- how religion effected (both Christian and Muslim) the study of Medicine
- not much change between the 11th and 16th century
- the similarly of the illegal medical study found in The Agony and the Ecstasy is striking
- how learned medical people fought to gain knowledge (instead of just accepting the bad air theory)
It is this major portion of the book (about 10%, which the Wiki book plot summary skips altogether, but delt with in the film plot) that deals with the Black plague and what the cause of it could be.
The film, of course, shows all of the gruesome details extensively.
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