Duckwise

This is it, the king daddy of pandemics in human history, the absolute deadliest thing we've known to hit mankind - the Black Death.  Now, I know what you're thinking; why does the death have to be black?  Well, it doesn't especially; at the time, it was alternately referred to as the "blue sickness," the Pestilence, the Great Pestilence and the Great Mortality, although even those last two names seem pretty insensitive when you consider that it probably wasn't so great for the people living (and dying) through it.  About 800 years after its last major appearance in the Plague of Justinian (longer than it's been for us since the Black Death itself), the bacteria Yersinia pestis hitched another ride out of its origins in Asia inside the bellies of fleas riding on rats.  Fleas are jerks, but they didn't like the plague any more than humans did, since it was killing them too, building up in their guts and blocking the blood they drink from getting far ...

Just to be clear, like children, all plagues are terrible, but Yersinia Pestis is the two-year-old child of plagues.  In fact, it's so bad, it's the plague they decided to straight-up call "the plague."  This little bug is fun because it can get you in one of three ways; the most common is bubonic, where the bacteria gets in the lymphnodes and swells them up into big, disgusting lumps on the throat, around the crotch and the armpits.  Less common but even deadlier options are pneumonic (infection of the lungs) and septicemic (infection of the blood).  There's one particular pandemic that we all remember it for best, but the Plague of Justinian was like the Black Death before it was cool.  In 541 AD, during the reign of Emperor Justinian, the plague entered Constantinople, the bustling capitol city of Byzantine Empire and just started killing like John Travolta does on the dang dance floor.  Contemporary sources blamed grain ships from Egypt, but modern DN...

The Antonine Plague, which first hit the RomanEmpire in 165 AD under the reign of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (hey, he was in 'Gladiator') and Lucius Verus (Wait, there were two emperors at the same time?  Yes, deal with it), was the probably the first pandemic in history to hit a body count in the millions.  This plague, primarily reported by the Greek physician Galen, is believed to have been brought back to Rome by soldiers who had been fighting for Roman freedom way down in Iraq, funnily enough.  Like other major disease outbreaks of the ancient world, we have to guess what the disease was these people were describing, because doctors back then were dum-dums who thought all illness and distemperaments were caused by too much blood, bile or phlegm.  Most scholars believe it to have been smallpox (possibly combined with outbreaks of measles), a disease that had been around for thousands of years, but the Romans were finally globalized and urbanized enough for it t...

Disclaimer: The publisher wishes to note that he has been warned that this series may be ill-conceived and in bad taste.  If, for whatever sick reason, you still wish to proceed, know that I was warned and advised against this. The Plague of Athens was not the first plague in human history, but it's the earliest one with a surviving reliable historical record.  The year was 430 BC, and those goofy Greeks were at each others throats in a little thing we're going to call the Peloponnesian War.  For a bunch of complicated reasons that basically boil down to Athens becoming the dominant empire in the Mediterranean and Sparta (whose balls were always tingling for a war anyway) deciding that was stupid.  Together with their respective alliances, Spartans and Athenians were having so much fun killing each other that, like the proverbial little sibling, Mother Nature decided she wanted to get in on the fun, at which point the Greeks decided it wasn't fun anymore.  ...

Before I continue, I feel obligated to acknowledge that I have been warned that this series may be ill-conceived and in bad taste.  If you still wish to proceed, do so with the knowledge that I was warned. Tonight is the first night of Passover in the Jewish faith, also known as Pesach.  Throughout history, humans have searched for meaning in the pestilences delivered upon them in the forms of disease, blight and more, trying to explain what the hell they did to piss off God so badly, but not in the case of a little faith-based incident believed to have been first recorded in the 5th century BC and said to have happened in Egypt.  The Egyptians knew darn well what they did.  When God sent Moses (whose name was actually "Moshe," and who Founding Father of the United States Thomas Paine called a "detestable villain") to tell the Pharaoh to free his Hebrew slaves because they were God's favorite, Pharaoh was like, "No."  So God sent a plague, but not ...