You would think, Jones says, 'that if this was such a major catastrophe, there must be drawings of it.

There just aren't images of what it was like to suffer from the Black Death drawn during the time of the Black Death.Д«etween about 13, the Black Death wiped out an estimated 50 percent of the European population. 'From what I've been able to find, there are no contemporary images of what the plague looks like,' says Jones, the historian. So, what medieval illustrations actually do depict the plague? 'This is the big hoodwinking everyone has participated in.' 'They fulfill our image of infectious disease,' she says, but they're wrong. The incorrect images, Green says, scratch our plague itch. It also inspired an early version of contact tracing, in which medical practitioners would search for neighbors and relatives who had been in contact with a plague victim and isolate them to prevent further infectious spread. Plague inspired the first known use of the quarantine, a word that comes from the Italian term for '40 days,' the amount of time that ships had to stay offshore before anyone was allowed to set foot on the ground. Second, while they certainly must have done their fair share of praying to the saints for recovery, they also knew much more about infectious disease than we give them credit for. They were probably sweating and shivering with fevers, and they supposedly smelled terrible, says Jones, 'because their bodies were breaking down from the inside.' But those aren't characteristics that would stand out in an illustration. But today, as in the past, plague victims would only have had one bump on their bodies - a big swollen lymph node called a 'bubo' close to where they were bitten by a flea carrying the infection. Some patients probably did get petechial hemorrhaging - pinpoint dark spots of blood under the skin. People in the mislabeled images tend to be covered from head to toe in red lesions. We see groups of victims mid-demise, covered in lesions, reaching up to the heavens for help that we know won't come.ДЇirst off, there were a lot fewer spots involved. 'In the pictures that have been mislabeled as the plague, we see in them what we want to see of the plague,' says Jones. A domino effect of misunderstanding, they say, likely originated with incorrect captioning by libraries and subsequently by art resource databases from which journalists purchase photos. 'It gives a misrepresentation of what the plague actually looked like and what people's experience was of it,' says Jones. Historians like Jones and Green are trying to correct such mistakes with websites including NPR, the BBC, Wikipedia and, most importantly, in libraries and art resource databases, including The British Library and Getty Images, that distribute the images. The British Library mislabeled the image as depicting people with the plague. This image in a 14th-century encyclopedia called the Omne Bonum shows a priest giving instructions to people with leprosy.

The plague doctor facts