The medieval Black Death: analysis of the demographic, health, and social consequences of a historic emerging disease

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Dr. Sharon DeWitte (University of South Carolina) will investigate the Black Death (c. 1347-1351), a devastating disease that was caused by the pathogen responsible for modern bubonic plague. The Black Death was one of the most important emerging infectious diseases in history, and such diseases are still major threats to public health today. This three-year study will be done using the skeletal remains of people who died just before, during, and after the Black Death in London. It will address the questions of why the Black Death emerged when it did, how the selective mortality of the epidemic in combination with post-epidemic rising standards of living shaped health and demographic patterns within the surviving population, and how plague epidemiology changed over time.This project will use hazard analysis of 1920 skeletons. Mortality and health patterns in the pre-Black Death period will reveal whether the population was becoming increasingly unhealthy before the epidemic. The post-Black Death samples will be analyzed to determine whether the surviving population faced lower risks of mortality, lived longer, and was healthier. This project will also reveal short-term changes in plague epidemiology that might have occurred because of changes in the human host or the pathogen. This project is important because it will improve understanding of medieval plague and, more generally, emerging disease dynamics. Investigating these diseases is vital to understanding modern human biology, demography, and culture given their power to shape populations and drive human evolution. It is also important to understand the social, political, and economic processes that affect the emergence, epidemiology, and human experience of disease, and to expand the temporal scope of such inquiries. Assessment of emerging diseases in the past can also benefit efforts to prioritize funding for studying modern emerging diseases and for enacting surveillance and preventative measures in living populations.