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Disease In The 19th Century Essay

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Europe did not have the best of luck when it came to good health in the 19th century and it was mainly due to poor hygiene; some of the deadliest diseases were bubonic plague, scarlet fever, typhus, influenza, and cholera. Each of these known diseases killed thousands of innocent people who believed that they were doing what needed to be done to protect themselves of any one of these diseases; fortunately, yet unfortunately (depending on whose side you took during wars), disease was used as a partially successful weapon. These diseases also helped improve hygienic standards of modern day, improve medical research and medical technology we have in use to this day. Even though disease is dispiriting, it can create exceptional opportunity …show more content…

This plague has many nicknames, such as, “black death, black plague, the blue sickness, and the great mortality,” and those nicknames came mainly from the visual effects of this disease. The physical side effects are, “painful and enlarged or swollen lymph nodes (an enlarged lymph node due to plague is called a bubo), chills, headache, fever, and weakness,” described by Dr. Melissa Conrad Stöppler. The symptoms occur within 2 days to a week of being affected and caused a 60% population decrease in Europe due to inaccurate treatment methods. Treatments were reasonably ill-advised and unorthodox; one highly unorthodox treatment is when people would live in sewers because they thought that the stench of the sewer would protect them from this airborne virus, however, it failed completely. A few other methods that were attempted, but ended in ultimate failure, was aromatherapy, asking God for forgiveness, eating rotten treacle, rubbing wounds with live chicken, cutting open their skin to release “toxic” blood, bathing in urine, cutting open the sores and applying human feces and flower root, and to kill the Jews. Bubonic plague had no known cure during this

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