The Problem of the Plague

15 Points Per Correct Answer - No time limit  

1. The plague in the sixth century was thought by medieval doctors to have been caused by what reptiles in the rivers? chameleons serpents iguanas tortoises

2. A more tragic misconception was that Europe's traditional scapegoats -- the Jews -- were somehow responsible. Throughout northern and western Europe, Jews were forced under torture to confess to having caused the Black Death by doing what? trading with infected regions conspiring with the Devil poisoning wells overcharging for medical services

3. The most widely held modern belief is that bubonic plague was carried by fleas living on what common pest? rats raccoons mice stray dogs

4. One explanation for the entry of the Black Death into Europe is that an invading army besieged a diseased city in the Crimea ... and the citizens did what? sent dying diplomats 'to negotiate surrender' but actually to spread disease welcomed them and gave them plague-infected blankets flung infected corpses over the walls breathed into their enemies' water supply

5. A competing medieval theory for how the Black Death reached Europe involved three infected ships which stopped first at what Italian city before being driven from port to port, not allowed to stop and unload, spreading pestilence in their wake? Milan Rome Venice Genoa

6. In Paris during the Black Death, the king convened a group of scholars who announced that the plague was caused by what? an ecological problem: rains of scorpions in the Orient a spiritual problem: mankind's sins had infuriated God an astrological problem: Saturn in the house of Jupiter a general physiological problem: the essential humors were out of balance

7. Modern academics Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe claim that bubonic plague is a classic example of what disease vector they call 'vertical transmission'? Mothers transmit pathogens to their unborn children Pathogens arrive on earth in an 'organic rain' from passing comets Due to the changed diaphragmic positions, standing people are more susceptible than people who are sitting The disease emerged in poorer areas and spread upward through the social classes.

8. The invention of microscopes enabled doctors to identify the bacillus that causes bubonic plague. What is its name? Yersinia coli Escherichia pestis Yersinia pestis Escherichia coli

9. A significant percentage of plague victims never developed the telltale buboes, or painful welts, that give bubonic plague its name; medieval plague victims also succumbed more quickly than is typical of bubonic plague sufferers. To explain these inconsistencies, modern historian Graham Twigg proposed that the bubonic plague epidemic was combined with an outbreak of what other disease? gonorrhea tuberculosis anthrax foot and mouth disease

10. The inconsistencies in the symptoms are more conventionally explained by the fact that the plague bacillus causes not only bubonic plague, but two other diseases as well. This theory holds that the Black Death was a combination of what three varieties of plague? bubonic, pneumonic, and meningial bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic bubonic, meningial, and septicemic meningial, septicemic, and tracheal