+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Culture (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-49.html)
+--- Forum: History (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-117.html)
+--- Thread: Recent research suggests that rats may not have played a critical role in Black Death (/thread-17830.html)
Recent research suggests that rats may not have played a critical role in Black Death - C C - Apr 19, 2025
Recent research suggests that rats may not have played a critical role in the Black Death
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-history/youve-been-lied-about-rats-and-black-death
EXCERPTS: What can that tell us about outbreak narratives and their importance?
Rats have long been associated with and blamed for the spread of plague, a disease that has killed over 200 million people throughout the past two millennia. The Black Death, a bubonic plague pandemic, is estimated to have resulted in the death of nearly 50% of Europe’s 14th century population, making it one of the deadliest disease outbreaks in human history.
However, emerging research suggests that rats may not have played a central role in the outbreak and transmission of plague. The historical attribution of plague’s spread to rats was neither an incidental nor trivial occurrence; instead, it had important and serious sociopolitical consequences that should not be overlooked...
[...] Christos Lynteris contends that historians and life scientists have taken these kinds of historical sources describing plague transmission at face value, thus treating them as objective pieces of epidemiological evidence without regard for historical context. As any good historian will tell you, primary sources must be analyzed within the context of the perspectives and motivations of those who created them.
Keeping this in mind, Lynteris argues that the image of a plague-spreading “staggering rat” was not intended to factually describe an observed mode of disease transmission but was instead aimed at depicting the Third Pandemic as a discordant, all-encompassing disaster that transgressed the natural order. This depiction was used to justify and promote colonialism and religious conversion, which—in the view of those disseminating this outbreak narrative—were the only possible solutions to this catastrophe.
What can we take away from all of this? The emergence of the rat-to-human transmission model during the Third Pandemic—which underlined an “end of the world” narrative used to further colonial agendas—makes it abundantly clear that the stories we tell about how diseases break out and spread have important consequences.
As the COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS pandemics have also shown us, these narratives can either exacerbate or mitigate the stigmatization of individuals, groups, cultures and lifestyles. They also influence how both scientists and the general public perceive the threat and nature of infectious diseases, thus affecting how they respond to them. Science does not exist independently of society; rather, it is shaped by and deeply intertwined with our beliefs, values and worldviews in a complex and intricate way... (MORE - missing details)