Do food shortages, social distancing or political posturing define your current life?
If so, you can at least take some comfort in the fact that it isn’t the first time in history that people have had to deal with such problems. Life under pandemics such as the Black Death or the 1918 influenza outbreak entailed many of the same conditions we are experiencing today — and many that were much worse.
To put things into historical perspective, we’ve highlighted four earlier pandemics and the conditions people faced.
By far the deadliest recorded pandemic, the Black Death probably originated somewhere in Asia in the 14th century. By 1347 it had reached Crimea, and from there the plague — which was carried in fleas that lived on and infected rats — spread through the rest of Europe and North Africa. The first outbreak wiped out anywhere from a third to two-thirds of ...
