• Login
    View Item 
    •   SMARTech Home
    • College of Liberal Arts - Ivan Allen College (IAC)
    • School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC)
    • Tech Gets Medieval Symposium: How Medieval Technology Can Teach the Past
    • View Item
    •   SMARTech Home
    • College of Liberal Arts - Ivan Allen College (IAC)
    • School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC)
    • Tech Gets Medieval Symposium: How Medieval Technology Can Teach the Past
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Biology and Germ Warfare

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    spencer.mp4 (82.90Mb)
    spencer_videostream.html (985bytes)
    transcription.txt (25.18Kb)
    Date
    2012-11-13
    Author
    Spencer, Chrissy
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    Biological or “germ” warfare among humans is an ancient battle tradition. Medieval European writings reveal evidence of biological warfare, such as poisoning well water with human remains (1155, Italy), catapulting plague victims into a besieged city (1346, Siege of Caffa), or mixing the blood of lepers with wine for sale to the enemy (1495, Italy) (reviewed in Reidel, 2004). In a contemporary account of the Siege of Caffa, Italian notary Gabriele de’ Mussi asserted that plague victims were catapulted inside the city walls as a deliberate form of biological warfare. He also assumes that Italians fleeing Caffa by ship carried the plague to port cities in the Mediterranean, thereby initiating a deadly pandemic called the Black Death, which was either bubonic plague or viral haemorrhagic fever (Duncan and Scott, 2005), in Europe. de’ Mussi’s second assertion has received criticism from modern scholars (Wheelis, 2002; Duncan and Scott, 2005), who contend that there were many other more probable causes of the Black Death pandemic. Whether or not the Black Death had its roots in biological warfare, the consequences of the pandemic were far-reaching, and decimated the European population while also causing human evolution that has ramifications for infections in the HIV pandemic of this era.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1853/46008
    Collections
    • Tech Gets Medieval Symposium: How Medieval Technology Can Teach the Past [8]

    Browse

    All of SMARTechCommunities & CollectionsDatesAuthorsTitlesSubjectsTypesThis CollectionDatesAuthorsTitlesSubjectsTypes

    My SMARTech

    Login

    Statistics

    View Usage StatisticsView Google Analytics Statistics
    facebook instagram twitter youtube
    • My Account
    • Contact us
    • Directory
    • Campus Map
    • Support/Give
    • Library Accessibility
      • About SMARTech
      • SMARTech Terms of Use
    Georgia Tech Library266 4th Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30332
    404.894.4500
    • Emergency Information
    • Legal and Privacy Information
    • Human Trafficking Notice
    • Accessibility
    • Accountability
    • Accreditation
    • Employment
    © 2020 Georgia Institute of Technology