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Please click here for the Was the Black Death a Virus? article. It raises the points I suggested to you in History Society…

“Textbooks tell us that the bubonic plague caused the Black Death. But not everyone is convinced. Since 1984, scientists have put forward alternative explanations for the Black Death. For example, sociologist Susan Scott and biologist Christopher J. Duncan claim that a hemorrhagic fever, similar to the Ebola virus, caused the Black Death. And others blame anthrax or say that some now-extinct disease was the culprit.

Bubonic plague just doesn’t make sense, they argue. The symptoms, the high mortality rate, the speed at which the disease spread, and the way the disease spread — none of it jibes with typical bubonic plague.”

Read it and see what you think.

Mr Kydd.

Click here for the excellent Spin the globe series from Radio 4. Each programme looks at a familiar historical date and finds out what was happening away from the geographical centre that makes them so familiar to us.

It is an attempt to see the globe as an historic whole and so break out of the modular way in which historic dates are traditionally drummed into us. At the same time it tries to  connects previously diverse events in cultural, political and economic history all over the globe.

Have a listen and see what you think.

Mr Kydd.

Something a bit different for you – an article and slideshow on an aspect of the history of medicine. I have posted this to accompany the work that we have been doing in the history society on the Black Death. If you click here you will get a webpage from the BBC News magazine about Andreas Vesalius’s medical text books and the place that they occupy in scientific history.

At our next meeting I will ask the question  why might the history of medicine be useful to us as students of the past ?

Have a look and see what you think.

Mr Kydd.