[ Bell Ringing ]
[ Silence ]
>> I'd like to take my mask off.
>> I think you might
be safe to take it off.
[Audience Laughing]
>> Okay.
[ Audience Clapping ]
>> Well, welcome to
the Museum of London
and our lovely plague doctor.
For today's lunchtime
lecture, Plagued Bones:
How London's Black Death
became a Tropical Disease.
There are some disease that
had a profound effect upon us
and the Black Death
is one such disease
that has had a lasting impact.
And research into
the Black Death
and other diseases provide
a fascinating insight
into the past, learning about
their mechanisms and the cause
and effect on past populations.
The Museum of London is very
fortunate to actually curate
over 17,000 archaeologically
derived humosgleath remains
with a direct link to the past
and have actually
aided in such research.
In advances in technical
sampling,
they've actually been able
to provide unique data
about the Black Death
itself and these collections
and other collections are
an exceptional resource
for Doctor Reeves to be able to
investigate and learn much more
about diseases of the past
and those affecting
populations in the world today.
So, it's with great pleasure
that I introduce Doctor Carole
Reeves, our lovely plague doctor
who was a medical historian
at UCL and whose two areas
of specialty are infectious
disease and madness and both
of which will come
together in today's talk.
[ Audience Clapping ]
>> Dr. Carole Reeves: Well, good
afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
And I hope you enjoyed
our little performance
and I'm sorry that
my hat fell off.
[Audience Laughing] It's
terribly hot in that mask.
Okay. Now, the Black
Death was a catastrophe
for our medieval
ancestors, killing up to half
of some communities
across Europe.
In 1348 when it began, London's
population was between 60,000
to 80,000 and a generation
later it was 40,000.
Now, today I'm going to
explore three things.
I'm going to explore how the
Black Death was understood
by people who experienced it
and to present the most
recent scientific evidence
for what might have caused it
and to tell you about a project
which we use the technology,
we at UCL are doing,
which we use the technology from
the recent Black Death project
to give us more information
about another disease
which caused great
distress to some
of our city-dwelling ancestors
and that's Marsh Fever or Agues.
Now, the first thing to say
about the Black Death is
that nobody called it the Black
Death in the 14th century.
That term appears to have been
first used in the 18th century.
The words plague, pest
or pestilence were the
most commonly used terms.
And the second thing
is not to lose sight
of the human catastrophe and
that's why I like the Museum
of London, because it
has many domestic objects
and I've just chosen
a few of them here
which might have
been used by people
who perished in these plagues.
Because, of course, apart
from the Black Death,
London has experienced a number
of plagues including the Great
Plague of 1665, which killed
at least 100,000 of
the city's residents.
And if you read extracts
from Samuel Pepys' diary,
he'll tell you much more
about it than I can.
Now, one thing we can say for
certain about the Black Death is
that it was an infectious
disease.
Nothing kills so rapidly
and so vociferously unless
it is an infectious disease.
And because it killed so
rapidly and indiscriminately,
we can assume that
it was an emerging
or re-emerging infectious
disease and that's one
that is essentially new to the
population it devastates and to
which the population has
little or no immunity.
Now, this picture is
actually captioned cleaning
up after the plague,
but if you look
at the person that's
cleaning up after the plague,
you can see that
she's wearing a crown.
So, she's hardly likely to be
cleaning up after the plague.
But I like to think that
the whole baronial family
in this residence has died
and that the servants are
wearing the crowned jewels.
[Audience Laughing] So, we
understand the Black Death
as an emerging infection,
but how is it understood
by the people living
at the time?
Well, together with war
and famine, plague is one
of the three arrows of God
and so for most citizens,
rich and poor, it's the ultimate
sign of God's displeasure
and power at their sins.
And the clergy certainly
take this morale stand-point.
But, being in the front line
and giving daily absolution
to the dying, they are
particularly badly affected
by the plague.
Up to 70% of the English
clergy perish along with one
in three cardinals and three
archbishops of Canterbury.
And just a reminder here that
the clergy is, of course,
under Rome's jurisdiction
at this time.
The protestant reformation
is yet to happen.
In Rome, meanwhile,
the French Pope,
Clement the 6th asks the cream
of the medical profession,
which happens to be in Paris,
to investigate the plague.
And the top doctors conclude
that the immediate
cause is astrological.
The conjunction of
Saturn, Jupiter and Mars
in the constellation of Aquarius
in March 1345 has caused hot,
moist conditions which forced
the earth to exhale a virulent,
sulfurous miasma, or in other
words, an evil smelling air.
Now, this sounds like an
earthquake and, indeed,
a powerful quake shakes Italy
to the core in January 1348,
immediately preceding
the onset of plague
and this is very important.
Most people accept that
stinking, poisonous vapors
from any source, but
particularly rotting refuse,
sewers and stagnant pools, carry
disease that can enter the body,
either by being breathed
in or indirectly
through the pours of the skin.
Now, this is a very good reason
not to immerse one's body
in water, which only
enlarges the skin's pours
and gives easier
access to the bad air.
Now, we do have a very
nice medieval photograph
of a bath's here, but as
you are probably imagine,
baths were not, at this time,
used for cleansing the body.
They had a very --
they had another --
they had another reason
for being and that's,
they were really body houses.
[Pause] The idea of things
going off or putrefying,
dying and stinking, and
thereby causing disease are very
powerful in a culture where
people live by their senses
and much closer to the
natural world in ways
that later generations do
not and, of course, we don't.
When the signs of plague
are first seen on humans,
black spots, large gangrenous
swellings called buboes
under the arms, in the groin
and the neck, a venomous fever,
feted breath and
sometimes blood vomiting,
the idea of putrefaction
seems horribly real.
Putrefying plague bodies are
believed to carry putrefaction
to other bodies and
so the plague spreads
with terrifying and
relentless speed,
sparing no one in its path,
and often killing its
victims within three days.
And where are the doctors?
Well, in the 14th century,
there are only a very few,
small number of elite physicians
available to the wealthy.
The range of practitioners
and healers
for everyone else includes
barber-surgeons, apothecaries,
herbalists, mid-wives and monks.
The plague doctors of later
centuries, their long beaks,
these long beaks, were
stuffed full of herbs
and fragrant spices in order
to ward off the evil airs
and they develop a range
of treatments based
on their understanding of the
disease and their understanding
of how the human body works.
And as you can see from this
picture, I'm actually --
my costume was specifically
chosen
to match exactly that,
that image there.
I have to say that the
hat doesn't really fit
on top of there.
It fitted me, but then
of course when you put it
on over the mask it's not
quite such a good fit.
But, this was a protective
costume.
The other thing that plague
doctors carried were these
lovely fumigating torches
and they would be filled
with an incense and they would
be carried and lit in front
of them to, again, ward off
the, to ward off the bad airs.
[Pause] And the things they
did were bleeding, purging,
sweating, blistering, cupping,
to draw the poisons
out of the body.
Hope you like my
picture of buttock cups.
These are glass cups.
Sometimes they were bronze and
they would be heated in a fire
and you can see the fire
over here, to extract the air
so you create a vacuum and
then stick them on the back
of the bottom or wherever and
that would draw out the poisons.
And cupping is still
used in Asian medicine,
but for a slightly
different purpose.
Burning, [Pause] again
burning, these are cauterized
so that they would
again be heated a fire
and you might burn
off the buboes.
So, burning or lancing
the buboes is now totally
excruciatingly painful,
as you can imagine,
but tends to be a last resort
because once the
buboes have appeared,
the victim is generally
considered to be doomed.
And lancing buboes may,
indeed, help spread the disease
because doctors who invest in a
heavy-duty lancet like this one,
used it on all their patients,
one after the another.
So, you'd lance a bubo, wipe it
on your rag, on to the next one,
wipe it on the rag,
on to the next one.
So, we think that actually,
doctors were spreading plague
rather than curing plague.
But, you have to remember,
of course, that the concept
of germs, let alone spreading
them, is quite recent
and that only dates to
the late 19th century.
And if you can't afford
to invest in a lancet,
you might place a venomous
creature, such as a frog, snake,
scorpion or crab, on a bubo
to draw out the plague poison.
And for the squeamish patient,
a reasonable alternative is
a chicken's bottom [Audience
Laughing] on which salt is
sprinkled to draw the poison.
And, for this to work, you
have to hold the chicken's beak
until it stops breathing
and dies,
hopefully before
the patient does.
Now, there's a story behind
this image because a couple
of years ago, I set
a competition
in the Young Archaeologists
magazine
to design a historical public
health poster and this was one
of the winning entries and
I think you have to say
that it's a superb
public health poster
and it's perfect for this talk.
One 17th century plague doctor
with a very interesting name
of William Boghurst
was considering this
to be a really superstitious
rubbish,
put forward his own remedy which
is to cut up a puppy dog live
and to ply him warm
to the chest.
Now, you might wince, but it's
probably better than snail tea.
Perhaps it's not surprising
that many people rely
on charms rather than doctors
and in the city streets
fires are burned with oak
and ash wood fragranced with
bunches of juniper and rosemary
to cleanse the polluted air.
You'll probably realize by
now that the pressure of space
for dead bodies during the
Black Death soon became an issue
and was solved by the creation
of two large emergency
cemeteries just beyond the
city walls.
One is at West Smithfield and
I've drawn the area, roughly,
where that original cemetery
was and you can see that it's
under Charter House Square
and the surrounding area.
And the other one is
this very smaller,
much smaller four-acre site
near the Tower of London.
This is now Royal Mint Street.
So, this is where the
second burial site was
and these were emergency,
emergency burial sites.
[Pause] Early this year,
excavators constructing
a cross-rail tunnel shelf
at West Smithfield, that was
the big, that's the big cemetery
around the corner
under Charter House,
discovered a dozen skeletons and
certainly, these were victims
of the Black Death who
represent a miniscule proportion
of the estimated 17,000
bodies buried on this site.
The other cemetery at
East Smithfield which held
about 2400 burials was
excavated between 1986 and 1988
by the Museum of London and
over 600 bodies were recovered.
Now, despite this desperate need
to dispose of bodies quickly,
many were buried with
dignity in wooden coffins
and orientated east
to west as required
in the Christian tradition
and you can see that there.
Those in burial pits were
layered, often five deep,
separated by a layer of earth.
And in Florence, during the
Black Death, this was likened
to making lasagna with
layers of pasta and cheese.
Now, you'll never eat
lasagna again without thinking
about the Black Death.
And I'm always interested
to think, what happened
to the people that were
burying these people every day?
I mean, what was
their life expectancy?
But, being ordinary people,
we never hear about them.
We'll return to this excavation
a bit later, but first I want
to fast-forward to plague's
last great pandemic which lasted
from 1855 to 1914 and it
killed about 10 million people,
mostly in India,
Hong Kong and China.
This is a rather sad looking,
make-shift hospital
in Hong Kong in 1894.
You can see that there's
very little comfort
for plague victims, probably
most of whom would have died
and it's rather, I would
think it's rather sad.
[Pause] And it's during
this pandemic that the cause
of plague is discovered in
the 1890s and it is, indeed,
an infectious disease caused by
a bacterium, Yersinia pestis,
which infects rodents and
is transmitted to humans
by rodents' flea bites.
By now, it's been
renamed bubonic plague
after the nasty buboes.
And the black rat, rattus
rattus, becomes the evil monster
in the story and plague is
reframed as a tropical disease.
Although the fear
that it will return
to Britain via its ports does
remain and this, I think,
is a very interesting image.
It shows Liverpool
Port Cemetery staff.
Now, it looks as though they're,
well, they're dunking rats
and killing them in that way.
But, what they're actually
doing, because these are,
the rats are all ready dead.
This is a rat cage, a rat trap.
They've missed that
one, of course,
but they're actually
dunking dead rats in buckets
of petrol to kill the fleas.
So, this is what was happening
in England at the time
and in London and in Liverpool.
So, people were very feared
that this now tropical
disease was going to come
and attack everybody in England.
The idea that it's no
longer an English disease,
it is now a tropical
disease, are threatened,
the tropics are threatened.
Remember, we're still a
colonial country at the time.
So, the idea is lost in a way,
that it was actually a disease
which, if you like, originated
or certainly came into
England and, you know,
decimated populations.
[Pause]
Many people at this time,
automatically assumed,
of course that all
previous plagues were caused
by the Yersinia pestis
germ, but is this true?
I mean, many historians say that
we shouldn't actually be looking
for the cause of a
disease in the past.
We should be thinking about how
it's contextualized in the past
and ignoring, you know, in a
way, a retrospective diagnosis.
[Pause] But, in order to
find out if we are dealing,
if we were dealing with
Yersinia pestis at the time
of the Black Death, let's return
to our cemetery in
East Smithfield.
[Pause] We don't know the name
of this man, but he was young,
age between 18 and 25, and
clearly had good teeth.
About 12% of people buried at
East Smithfield, because that's
where he came from, were in
this age, in his age group
and there was a significantly
greater proportion
of men than women.
[Pause] Don't know why, really.
That, I mean, we can speculate,
but we don't entirely know why.
Now, we do know the
name of this person.
I think she's in the audience,
but she probably isn't dressed
like a 21st century plague
doctor, but here she is
and she's Doctor Sharon DeWitte,
a biological anthropologist
from the University
of South Carolina.
And, Sharon is one of the
most recent scientists
to analyze the East
Smithfield plague bones.
And, in 2010, she and her
colleagues extracted tooth pulp
from the young man
and subjected it
to the most recent DNA recovery
and analysis techniques.
They were hoping to
discover ancient DNA,
not of the young man himself,
but of the Yersinia pestis
bacteria they thought might be
lurking in his molars.
The difficulty of doing
this, says Hendrik Poinar,
one of the scientists
on the project
and to whom I am
indebted for this slide,
is like finding needles
in a football field.
And if you look at what
you have to do, I mean,
I'm not a scientist so if you
have got scientific questions,
I'll try, but I might
not be wonderful at it.
This, oh. I beg your pardon.
[Pause] Obviously, this is the
pathogen, this is the, say,
this is the Yersinia pestis.
This is what you're looking for,
but you've got all these
other contaminants.
You've got bacteria in the soil.
You've got fungal spores.
You've got human DNA.
You've got a 600-year-old
skeleton buried in the earth.
So, you've got to, if you like,
filter out everything
you don't want
to find the thing you do want.
And, some recent, this
has been, in a way,
this is recent technology,
[Pause]
and a very recent technology
which was what was used
in this project was that
they used DNA sequences
from a modern plague
strain as bait to fish
out the ancient Yersinia
pestis DNA.
So, they targeted.
That's what they
were looking for.
And what did they find?
Well, they did find
ancient Yersinia pestis
and their findings suggest
that the particular
strain responsible
for the Black Death probably
emerged not long before the
devastating pandemic began.
All modern strains of the
bacteria seem to have evolved
from the Black Death strain.
[Pause] But, as with all
scientific discovery related
to past populations,
everything is up for debate
and there are gaps to be filled.
For example, new infections
don't emerge in a vacuum.
They are related amongst other
things to change in eco systems,
climate and land use,
urbanization, travel, poverty,
poor health and co-existing
human diseases.
There were, for example,
a series of famines
in the early 14th
century associated
with unusually cold
winters and wet summers.
Ha-ha. It's all happening again.
Including the great
famine of 1315 to 1317
in which there was great
poverty and starvation.
There's a suggestion,
too, that Yersinia pestis,
[Pause] oh, I beg your pardon.
There was mass movement of
troops returning from wars
and skirmishes in Asia
and Europe and the opening
up of silk roads to traders,
travelers and villains.
Oh. [Pause] Explorers.
villains, crossing continents.
And, although the black rat
has always played the villain,
Yersinia pestis can infect
other rodents such as marmots.
So, we're not specifically
looking at the rat.
So, although the rat has had
the bad press and you all know
that the black rat
spread the plague.
It may not have been only
the black rat, certainly not
in other parts of the world.
There is a suggestion, too, that
the human flea played a role
in spreading the
plague so rapidly.
And we know that most people,
irrespective of social status,
were invested with fleas,
lice and intestinal parasites.
And here's a great image.
This is a medieval image from
a book on how to keep healthy
to show that this is a
de-fleaing brush and,
or delousing brush and this
lady's obviously cleaning her
bed, but she's lifted
up her skirt
and she's being bitten
by bed bug.
So, this is very
common and infestation
with intestinal parasites
is very common.
And, so a co-existing infection,
infestations and infections
such as tuberculosis may
also have contributed
to the high plague
mortality rates.
So, we're looking
at a number of --
historians would pick
up on a number of things
that might be happening
at the time.
And, now, finally, let's return
to our bad airs or mal arias
as they were called
in the ancient world.
And you can immediately see the
origin here of the word malaria.
It simply means bad air.
And mal arias were the supposed
cause, not only of plague,
but of recurring and
intermittent fevers,
which in Britain
were called agues.
And you can also see how
the word ague can be got
from plague.
Agues are very well described
by doctors from the 17th
to the 19th century and were
particularly troublesome
to people who lived in the
marshy areas along the Thames
from West Minster to Suffolk
and into the estuary
marshes of Kent and Essex.
Here, the pestiferous vapors
and fogs were believed
to undermine the inhabitants'
constitutions so severely
that they were permanently ill
and experienced higher death
rates than those who lived
on higher ground away
from the bad marshy airs.
And this is very
well documented.
In 1724, Daniel Defoe
wrote a travel guide
to the eastern counties of
England in which he claimed
that men who farmed in the
fens and were acclimatized
to its evil vapors often sought
Upland wives who frequently died
after two or three
years of marriage.
Some men, says Defoe, had 10
or 15 wives during
their own lifetimes.
The reason that women didn't
live in the Fens themselves
as much as men, farming
a fens was a bit
of a blokey thing to do.
So, single men would go.
They might be ill, but
the money was really good
and the soil was really rich.
So, they would just,
there were chances.
And, but in order to find a
wife, they needed to go upland
and these women were not immune.
They hadn't developed
an immunity
to these agues so they did die.
And, so it is on record
that they did actually
have a number of wives.
But, they were chronically ill
and the children were as well.
And although there's
no absolute proof
that the ague described
prior to the discovery
of the malaria parasite
really was malaria,
we have much written evidence
to suggest that it was.
In addition, malaria is
spread by a particular type
of mosquito, called
the anopheles.
[Pause] And several
varieties of which were found
to transmit malaria after
an outbreak on the Isle
of Sheppey in Kent in 1919.
And the Isle of Sheppey had
previously been notorious
for agues and I've called
this Dad's Army Fights Malaria
because this is a
contingent of soldiers
from the first world
war who actually sent
out to help drain the marshes
after this really quite
serious outbreak of malaria.
Not just amongst soldiers
returning from India and places
where malaria was prevalent, but
also people who had never been
out of England caught
it as well.
So, they went out to
drain the marshes.
And when publicity for this
talk was being tweeted,
we received an e-mail from a New
Zealand surgeon who had worked
at West Minster hospital
in the early 1960s
and he recalled being told
about a malaria researcher
who was importing anopheles
mosquitoes at considerable cost
from Asia until a new
lab technician stated
that he could supply
them much cheaper.
So, he collected them from the
marshes to the east of London.
So, they're there,
waiting for us.
[Audience Laughing] Agues didn't
decimate entire communities
in the manner of
plagues so we're unlikely
to find an ague burial site.
but over the past few years,
I've been trolling 18th
century archives searching
for individuals who lived
in areas defined as aguish
and who wrote good personal
accounts of their ague fevers.
And this is not as straight
forward as it sounds
because there are very
few historical accounts
of personal illness and even
fewer doctor's case records
describing them.
But, people who do leave
records are the clergy.
So, we're coming back now,
full circle, to the clergy.
And as with plagues, they were
often badly affected by agues
because they went into
parishes as parish priests
in parishes where, which were
new to them and they didn't,
they weren't acclimatized
to the agues.
And they were often
badly affected by them.
And parish priests were
also, many of them,
buried within their churches,
usually in triple-lined
coffins of wood-lead-wood.
So, preservation
is theoretically
as good as it gets.
And I hope, in the near
future, to be able to show
that this other English
pestilent, Marsh Fever,
was actually malaria, now
also, one of the great scourges
of the developing world.
And in the process, I want
to thank all of the people
who have made this research,
not only for the
Black Death possible,
but for my agues project.
Now, if anybody would
like to ask questions,
I'm happy to be here
[Pause] for you.
[Pause] Do I have any questions?
[ Audience Clapping ]
I think we've got a
roving microphone, so --
[ Pause ]
Have you got any views on the
sweating sickness of the Tudors?
Was that connected
to [inaudible].
>> We don't know.
The sweating sickness
seems to have come and gone
and it's very difficult
to, we don't know.
I mean, it's one of those very
unusual conditions that seems
to have come and disappeared
and nobody's really come
up with what it might have been.
I mean there are lots of,
there are lots of theories
about the sweating sickness but,
from a food poisoning to anthrax
to -- but nobody knows and
it seemed to disappear.
But, this is what
happens with infections.
I mean, we know that the Black
Death was an emerging disease
but we've had hundreds
of emerging diseases.
Obviously HIV-Aids is
an emerging disease
that really surfaced in the
1980s, although probably it was
around before but we
didn't recognize it.
So, emerging diseases are
happening all the time.
So, it could have been --
and it could have been an
emerging disease and it went.
We don't know.
No. I'm sorry.
I can't answer that
question, I'm afraid.
That's a [Pause].
So. Somebody?
Did you have a -- ?
[ Pause ]
Yes.
>> One. [Pause] Is this working?
>> I think.
Yeah, it should be.
>> At one stage it was suggested
that it wasn't actually
from the fleas on the rats
and that it was something akin
to Ebola and even Aids.
What kind of information?
>> Well, the thing is
that the -- [Pause] Yes.
But they found the Yersinia
pestis bacteria so --
so you can rule out
Ebola, I think.
Again, you know, Ebola is
a modern emerging disease.
I mean, we don't know how
old these diseases are or --
you see some infections
re-emerge
because obviously the
bacteria and the virus evolves.
You know? And they can evolve
much faster than we can
because they're reproducing
very quickly
but I think having found the
Yersinia pestis bacterium, yes.
I mean, you can say
now, it's almost certain
that that explains
the Black Death.
But, nothing is cast
in stone, you know?
I mean, historians are always
a bit skeptical of everything
and that's what we're paid to
do and if we don't make it up,
you know, we lose our jobs.
So, we try and, you know, we try
and reconstruct what's going on
but I think it, I think if
anybody's -- If Sharon is here,
she'll want to tell you that it
definitely is Yersinia pestis.
[Audience Laughing]
>> I'm Doctor Langsman.
We spoke earlier this
morning on the telephone.
[Pause] Doctor Langsman.
>> Okay. Do --
>> Between the 1300s and the
late 1600s, in today's phrase,
were any lessons
learned about treatment?
Also, I can't really accept
that they found bacteria
in the dental pulp because that
was formed between the ages of 6
and 20 and I can't see how
a bacteria could have got
within the pulp.
Then, finally, in my
clinical years I spent time
at St. Pancras Hospital
overlooking a park
that was a site when the railway
to St. Pancras was built,
they discovered a
plague pit at that park.
Also some Napoleon prisoners
of war were buried there.
>> Okay. So, let me
take the first question.
What was the first
question again?
[Audience Laughing]
>> Was any lessons learned
between 1300 and 1600?
>> Well, not specifically.
The idea that, that any
disease was [Pause].
The idea on how the body worked
was based on humeral theory
which was a healthy
body had to flow.
So, the idea that you
needed to remove the toxins
or the bad humors from the
body by purging, bleeding,
or cupping, that would
have been a 13th century.
That goes right back to
the ancient Greeks and so
that would definitely have been
still the same type of treatment
up until the plague of the
17th century and, indeed,
well into the 18th century.
So, the idea of how the
body worked didn't change
and so the treatments
themselves didn't change.
This mask was worn more by
doctors in the later plagues
than in the Black Death.
I mean, I think only
the Italian doctors
in the Black Death
era wore the mask.
As far as -- what was
your second question?
>> [Inaudible]
>> Oh, yeah, you couldn't
accept the dental pulp.
>> Yes.
>> Well, all I can
say is that the --
that when your body is infected
with any bacterial parasite,
it goes everywhere and so it
doesn't matter what age you are.
I mean, that --
and we definitely use
dental -- we do extract.
In fact, you get very rich
material from dental pulp
as you do from the sternum.
And there are certain bones
that when you're taking samples
for analysis for
ancient DNA analysis,
you would use certain bones
which are very rich in marrow
and rich in -- You know, this
is where these bacterias sit.
So, I think that's quite widely
accepted by archeologists
and there are experts
here who are
in a better place
than me to say that.
And yes, I mean, there are
plague pits all over London.
But, you know, people
haven't necessarily worked
on all of them.
But, yes. I mean there was
a time, now I don't know --
obviously Jelena
will correct me,
but there was a time certainly
when every single body
or galethal remain
which was excavated
in London building the
undergrounds, etcetera,
came into, into the
museum of London.
So, there's material, you know,
which this research can be made.
But, I don't know whether
any bodies from your,
that particular plague
pit came in.
But, you do have to work
on the right remains.
I mean, not everything that you
excavate or exhume is suitable
for research because it
might be too badly damaged.
And in certain parts of the
country, this is my problem
with my malaria, because most
of my victims are in Essex
and Kent, but the soil is
very acidic and so if you try
to exhume the body in the soil
from an ordinary grave site,
you'll very rarely
get anything useful
from those galecal remains
because they're too damaged
which is the reason why
I'm looking at Vicars,
parish priests, not just because
they left records and I have
to have archival records of
agues because I can't just go
and dig up a body and, you
know, do some research.
There has to be a reason.
You have to make it.
It's very hard to do that.
You have to have a very
good case and it has to go
through a lot of procedure.
So, I'm looking at people who
were buried within churches
because I know that I am getting
the best possible, you know,
preservation that I can because
if you're buried intramurally,
you know, within a
church, you have to be
in a triple-lined coffin
and that was the law.
So, it has to be wood-lead-wood.
So, you can't get -- you can't
get evidence from anything.
It has to be absolutely right.
Yes. Yes. Oh, sorry.
>> Talking of plague pits,
when I was a child I was told
that a patch of land in
or by Hampstead Parish
Church was an old plague pit
and it couldn't be developed
because if you dug it up,
you would release all
these plague germs.
How much truth is there in that?
>> Yes. Well, I think everybody
who -- theoretically, yes.
Theoretically you could,
but, people who do work --
I mean, you saw that costume
that Sharon was wearing.
If you do work on material
which is potentially pathogenic,
you do have to be
very well protected.
>> Can I say something
about that?
>> Yes, Sharon.
>> I'm the woman in
that horrible outfit.
[Audience Laughing] I
was actually wearing
that because I was taking
samples and I didn't want
to contaminate the samples.
>> Okay.
>> When I'm doing
osteological work,
I don't wear anything except
for gloves so that I can get
to the bathroom more
quickly [Inaudible]
and I've been working
on Black Death victims
for 10 years and I'm alive.
[Audience Laughing]
>> So, you don't worry, Sharon?
>> I'm not worried whatsoever.
The DNA itself is degraded
so there's certainly no
functional or viable bacteria.
>> OKay.
>> SO everyone should rest easy.
If you find a plague pit,
get somebody to excavate it
and then call me, please.
[Audience Laughing]
>> And I did, of course, Jelena,
bless her, taught me on --
I did a three month
bioarcheological course here
and we articulated
skeletons and we just did it.
I mean, you know, and I'm still
alive and Jelena's still alive.
I guess there isn't.
Yeah. I guess people
aren't worried about that.
I mean, if you work
in a hospital,
you're working amongst bacteria
and viruses all day and so.
>> The thing they might
be worried about sometimes
if they go on excavations
is chance
of anthrax so that they wouldn't
[Inaudible]
>> I'm afraid that's all
we've got time for now,
and we'll say thank
you very much, again,
to Carole and for her talk.
>> Thank you.
[Audience Clapping]
