Yersinia pestis, natural history(ies)

The modes of transmission of Yersinia pestis are the subject of increasingly sophisticated biological and epidemiological studies, based not only on the current clinical picture but also on retrospective modeling of past sources. Yet the virulence of the medieval epidemic remains difficult to understand using such models. The lecture suggests alternative hypotheses on the possibility of human-to-human contagion and the persistence of plague foci in Europe, taking into account the environmental dimension of a global but discontinuous account of the epidemic.

Contents

• "Plague has long been my profession": Henri Mollaret, Jacqueline Brossolet and the Institut Pasteur's plague department
• Latest news on the third plague pandemic (Eric Bertherat, World Health Organization, Weekly epidemiological record, 25, 2019)
• Current etiology: essentially three clinical forms (septicemic, bubonic and pulmonary)
• When the bubo is no longer sufficient for retrospective diagnosis: the search for carbunculi (Samuel Cohn, Cultures of Plague. Medical thinking at the end of Renaissance, 2010)
• Threats to biodiversity, antibiotic resistance and bioterrorism: the economics of research into the bacillus "with the highest human pathogenicity in the bacterial world" (Elisabeth Carniel)
• Rapid testing of YP 's F1 antigen: the risks of the past and the fallout from the hauntings of the present (Raffaela Bianucci et al., CR Biologies, 2007)
• In the USSR from the 1920s to the 1970s: the impossible eradication of plague (Susan D. Jones et al., PNAS, 2019)
• Zoonosis and species hopping: the general pattern of transmission from flea to rat and from rat to man
• Progress through replication of micro-events (Monica Green, The Medieval Globe, 2014)
• When history passes through a flea bite: microbiology of infection (Amélie Dewitte et all, PLOS Pathogens, 2020)
• From rat death to human death: the plague in Cairo in 1801 (Xavier Didelot, et al., J. R. Soc. Interface, 2017)
• Also in Cairo, but in the ^15th century, at the time of the "great annihilation" (Stuart Borsch and Tarek Sabraa,MamlῡkStudies Review, 2016)
• A lingering suspicion about pulex irritans (Katharine R. Dean et al., PNAS, 2018)
• Plague spread through human populations with a rapidity and ease that are hardly compatible with the classical model of transmission from rat to rat flea and then to man" (Isabelle Séguy and Guido Alfani, "La Peste: bref état des connaissances actuelles", Annales de démographie historique, 2017)
• The circulation of microbiological knowledge from Bombay, the plague's "experimental theater" (Pratik Chakrabarti)
• Pour en finir avec l'orientalisme épidémiologique: relectures historiennes des Rapports d'études sur la peste en Inde (Samuel Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, 2002)
• Death and resurrection of a paradigm (Samuel Cohn, "Black Death, End of a Paradigm" American Historical Review, 2002)
• " We believe that we can end the controversy: Medieval Black Death was Plague ": how not to end a controversy (Didier Raoult et al., PNAS, 2000)
• From species to environments and from Mongolia to the Italian Alps: look for the marmot (V.V. Suntsov, Biol Bull Russ Acad Sci, 2012)
• History of the 1567 Milanese epidemic and hypothesis on the persistence of plague in Europe (Ann Carmichael, The Medieval Globe, 2014)
• Back to basics: Avignon in 1348, Guy de Chauliac and Louis Sanctus de Beringen
• Epidemiological modeling of traditional demographic sources: the case of Nonantola in 1630 (Guido Alfani and Samuel Cohn, "Nonantola 1630: Anatomia di une pestilenza e mecanismi del contagio", Popolazione e Storia, 2, 2007)
• On the trail of human-to-human contamination: excess mortality and density of human outbreaks (Guido Alfani and Marco Bonetti, "A survival analysis of the last great European plagues: The case of Nonantola (Northern Italy) in 1630", Population Studies, 73, 2019)
• Qui comincia il contaggio : the death of Antonia Tarossi and her family
• "In Marseilles, out of 150 Friars Minor not a single one remained: that's how it is": Henry Knighton and the smallness of history
• Natural history or natural stories? A global but discontinuous narrative
• After nature, after history: restoring the legibility of history by acknowledging the heterogeneity of images
• " The need to know was contradicted by the tendency to close one's eyes" (W.G. Sebald, On Destruction as Part of Natural History, 2001)
• Les yeux écarquillés et les yeux bandés : retour sur la scène du crime (Henri Mollaret and Jacqueline Brossollet, À propos des "Pestiférés de Jaffa" by A.J. Gros, 1968)