In the spirit of Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book, what if I were time-travelling back in the calamitous 14th Century, and despite avoiding fleas and people with the pneumonic form of the Black Plague, I came down with it anyways. Given that I know about microbes and basic physiology, is there anything I could do to increase my chances of survival, in terms of nursing and/or medication?
I know that certain root vegetables such as onions and garlic have mild antibiotic effects. Would gorging on them help? Are there any other naturally occurring substances or herbs that would actually be of use?
Could I pull a MacGyver and manufacture a rudimentary antibiotic out of moldy bread? (Let’s assume that I have some warning of the approach of the plague, so I have a few weeks to fool around in my primitive laboratory.)
Let’s assume I haven’t caught the Plague yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Could I emulate Jenner and produce a crude vaccination using weakened or dead bacteria from other Plague victims? Or would I be more likely to just kill myself trying?
Just to be really pedantic, it wouldn’t matter, since the ordinary measles and flus and other everyday diseases you just carried back in time with you will create a second wave of great plagues, wiping our Europe and your own timeline and existence…
But, more seriously, if you knew it was coming, you’d have time to distill enough alcohol to serve as an everyday disinfectant. You’d make up face masks and gloves; you’d cleanse your home of rats and fleas; etc. etc. etc.
A pound of prevention is sometimes better than an ounce of cure.
If it was late winter/early spring, you would have some vitamin deficiencies and therefore lowered resistance and slow healing in general.
If you saw the plague coming, or on general principals, you should be consuming dried rose hips from last fall, wheat sprouts, bean sprouts, sprouting endive, dried milk powder from last spring if you managed to fabricate and store it, turnips from the root cellar, and the pot-water any of those things was cooked in, and get some sunshine. And consume some of the things the local old wise women recommend for healing wounds, they usually have vitamins (per Euell Gibbons I think).
Firstly if you’re of European stock you will alraedy have a genetic advantage in surviving plague.
You could take a shot at producing a vaccine. Take some of the pus from bubonic sores and heat it in a metal tray placed in boiling water. Begin as soon as possible. The first batch should be boiled for say 20 minutes, and subsequent batches treated for less time and lower temps. Use a sharp knife and cut a very small flap of skin. PLace the pus under the skin, plaster the skin down and pray. Hopefully by the time the batch contains significant numbers of live bacteria you will have received enough dead or weakened bacteria to have some resistance. This would be incredibly dengerous though. You’d be better off trying to avoid the disease.
The easiest way to avoid infection would be to stock up on food and water and move into the country. If you can’t do that then:
Procure some rat poison. Numerous poisonous substances were available at the time. Use them all.
Increase your household hygeine. Try to block up rat holes. Keep all food in onatiners and clean up religiously afer every meal. In general make your house unattractive to rodents.
Sleep on a bed with metal bands on the legs to prevent rodents from climbing over you while you sleep.
4)Mop your floors with boiling water as often as possible to kill flea eggs/cocoons.
Soak you clothes, particulalry your legs, in turpentine, creosote or other insect repellants.
Is there any evidence at all that those things would in any way be more effective than the standard 1542 diet of fresh/dried fruit and vegetables and whole grains? What exactly would rose hips contain that apples wouldn’t?
I also note that the list misses the single most lacking substance in the average person’s diet at the time: animal products. Chronic protein and B vitamin deficienies have been blamed for the increased prevalence of many diseases in undeveloped nations.
Since you already mentioned the book by Connie Willis , I would also recomend that you read 1633 by Eric Flint , alough how you might make the DDT without the infrastructure in his novels is the Question.
Killing rats is not the end all be all , you have to kill the lice that were traveling on the backs of rats , which makes the DDT all the more important.
The OP’s premise was that, despite having avoided all this stuff, he/she had come down with the plague anyway. In other words, the prevention stuff is nice, but it isn’t the root of the question.
And I am interested in the bit about the rose hips, too.
RR
Maybe I am misinterpreting the spirit of the question, but assuming you are “time-traveling” of your own accord and not just flung into a time/space anomaly, wouldn’t you want to prepare yourself for the plaque BEFORE you left? And if so, with modern medicine and technology available, I ask, what would you do to prevent the plague before you went? Penicillin and OFF! repellent? Sorry if this is a hijack.
In the book 1632/1633 by Eric Flint mentioned above, they also grew a plant that provides the equivelant of penicillin, but has more dangerous side effects. I can’t remember what it is, it was appearently used in the 50’s but went out of favor because of the harmful reactions some people had. If you could grow and process that though, it would certainly help (if its not fiction). In the book, basically, they decided that a 5% reaction by the population was much better than losing 50% of the people.
What about blood serium? Couldn’t you take blood from a recovered plague victim, spin it via centrifugal force (tie a rope to a pot, put it on a wheel of some kind and spin it around) and then draw off the serium? Would this work? (I’m obviously not a medical person so just speculating…be gentle you medical types).
If you HAVE the plague, the plant above would be your best bet (unless you brought penicillin with you). Also, keep yourself hydrated, from what I understand, would be a big help as well.
Yes, you could make penicillin from moldy bread. But unless you do some research beforehand, how are you going to recognize penicillin mold? This isn’t something you can whip up in a few days. You’d probably need at least a year-long research project. Set out various foods, collect the wild mold spores, take samples of the mold spots and innoculate sterile media with your samples to get pure strains. Then when you have the mold growing, start testing your strains for antibiotic property. Maybe you could see if the molds kill acetobacters from vinegar, or maybe there’s a better way. Then you’d have to build some syringes (If you were in America you could use a rattlesnake fang and a pig’s bladder). When someone gets infected start injecting them, or since you’re not treating a local infection maybe you’d be better off trying to get them to eat the mold. In any case, you’d have to experiment with different methods and see which ones give your patients the best chance of survival.
The hard part is that during this research project you’re still going to have to be making a living somehow. If you’ve established yourself as the court magician of some aristocrat well and good. If you’re in some village farming, you’d have trouble taking time from food-gathering and other survival activities to carry out your research. Think about how difficult it would be to replicate the discovery of penicillin today, in your own house, with supermarkets and libraries to help you.
chloramphenicol…that sounds like the name of a processed drug. I know, in the book at least, that the marijuana famer/herbalist was growing it so it must be a natural plant of some kind, with the drug being able to be refined in fairly primitive circumstances…if it wasn’t all fiction. I hope someone with medical knowledge can chime in and the thread doesn’t just die…its a very interesting subject.
Given that there’s no reason to suspect that vitamin C overdose protects on from the plague, I think you’d be better doing somehting other than collecting rosehips. The human body requires persishingly small quantities ov vit C. Assuming you’re eating some fresh plant matter rose hips wouldn’t do anything at all.
The vitamin issue came up in context of late winter, when there are no fresh vegs, and stored apples etc etc were already eaten or gone bad, and the general diet was likely to be mostly boiled barley/wheat/oats, some meat, shrivelling turnips, and a little lard. (A lot of the foods we eat were introduced from the Americas after 1492.)
People, though probably not dying of scurvy and pellagra, would at that season be deficient to marginal in multiple nutrients. The American diet has had vitamins added for a couple of generations now, and no one is familiar with cuts that do not heal till someone fixes you a mess of greens to eat (referred to as “healing herbs”).
In spring green stuff would sprout for the eating, and that issue would diminish. The lice would bite, but the plague would not hit you and yours as hard. As Blake said, you want adequate animal products as well.
Another stratagem would be to get your whole village motivated to do rat-killing and hygiene. Edjumacate them! Get a periphery that isn’t at the four walls of your own house.
How common were witch-hunts back then? I realize that the Black Plague of the 14th Century was three hundred years distant from the Burning Times of the 17th Century, but anyone practicing medicine (as opposed to praying and self-flagellation) in Europe during the Dark Ages would have been wide open to wild accusations.
(“Why hasn’t Finagle gotten sick yet? My family has lost three children already, and Finagle’s out there gathering weird moulds and performing strange rites by candlelight! Is that foreigner killing us?”)