• On the Source of the Black Death

    by Roberto — Yersinia pestis. How im­me­di­ate our re­ac­tion can be to the species name of this bac­terium, mak­ing us con­jure up im­ages of pesti­lence. As its dis­cov­erer, Alexan­der Yersin, wrote in 1894 of an out­break of bubonic plague in Hong Kong, this is the "bacille de la peste." (Work­ing in­de­pen­dently, Ki­tasato Shibasaburo also char­ac­ter­ized the plague bac­terium at nearly the ex­act same time.)

  • A Pestis from the Past

    by S. Mar­vin Fried­man — In re­cent decades we've come to re­al­ize that vic­tory goes not to the swift or to the strong, but to the im­mune. The in­tro­duc­tion of agents of deadly dis­eases into im­muno­log­i­cally naïve pop­u­la­tions de­ter­mined mo­men­tous events in hu­man his­tory. The con­quest of the Amer­i­cas re­sulted in good part from the…