342 • Notes to Pages 285–290- Personal communications by Dr. Mollaret to the authors, 1998 – 99.
- Andrew Wear, Wellcome Institute, personal communication to the authors. A
measured support of this view is in Slack,The Impact of Plague, 323 – 26. Slack points out
that the return of plague to Britain in Liverpool, Glasgow, and Suffolk in the early
twentieth century was probably via steamships that bypassed the quarantines. He sug-
gests that the outbreaks were contained because of hygienic and environmental im-
provements and the absence of the black rat by that time. - Braude et al.,Infectious Diseases, 334.
- It is possible that there was an additional adjustment between the plague microbes
and fleas. Joseph Hinnebusch reports from the Laboratory of Microbial Structure and
Function in Montana: “Proventricular blockage by Y. pestisis an inefficient process in all
fleas that have been examined, which may reflect a recent adaptation to the insect host.
Unless they ingest a large number of bacteria, most fleas clear themselves of infection
without ever becoming blocked.” Hinnebusch, “Bubonic Plague,” 648. - Guiyoule et al., “Plague Pandemics,” 634 – 41.
- The reservations are summarized by Samuel K. Cohn Jr., “The Black Death: End
of a Paradigm,”American Historical Review 107 ( 2002 ): 735 n. 133. Andrew Wear, after
noting Cohn’s skepticism of the accuracy of the DNA findings, concludes, “However, if
further positive DNA findings are produced, we will have to begin to consider that
plague was after all one disease, but bearing Cohn’s research in mind, an extremely pro-
tean one.” Andrew Wear, review of Cohn,The Black Death Transformed: Disease and
Culture in Early Renaissance Europe(London, 2002 ), in Times Literary Supplement,Nov.
5 , 2002. - For research on dental pulp from Montpellier dated to the Black Death period,
see Didier Raoult, Gérard Aboulharen, Eric Crubézy, et al., “Molecular Identification
by Suicide PCR of Yersinia pestisas the Agent of Medieval Black Death,”Proceedings of
the National Academy of Science 97 ( 2000 ): 12800 – 3. For similar identification on dental
pulp in southern France in charnel houses dating to 1590 and 1720 , see G. Aboudharam,
M. Signoli, E. Crubézy, et al., “La mémoire des dentes: le cas de la peste,” in Peste: En-
tre épidémies et sociétés,International Congresses on the Evolution and Paleoepidemiol-
ogy of Infectious Diseases (Marseille, 2001 ), 70. - Thomas,Religion and the Decline of Magic, 7.
- Hinnebusch, “Bubonic Plague,” 645 – 52.
54 .Mirko Grmek,Diseases in the Ancient Greek World,trans. Mireille Muellner and
Leonard Muellner (Baltimore, 1989 ), 277. - See Tim Radford, “Chinese Malaria Remedy Tested,”Guardian,April 25 , 2001.
We thank Audrey B. Wright for locating this reference. - Thomas Daniel,Captain of Death: The Story of Tuberculosis(Rochester, N.Y.,
1997 ), 1 , 52. - A good introduction on AIDS is Garrett,The Coming Plague, 281 – 389.
- This summary of the early stages of the SARS epidemic is based on major news-
paper reports, including Lawrence K. Altman and Denise Grady, “Study Says [SARS]