From Stuart Leslie
A few years ago (24 November 2001, p 34) you published an article about research by Sue Scott and Christopher Duncan which theorised that the Black Death was not, as has been believed for the past hundred years or so, bubonic plague.
I have since found considerable information on the subject, particularly in the work of Samuel K. Cohn, who was independently doing the same sort of research at the same time.
That the Black Death was bubonic plague was an assumption made by Alexandre Yersin, who in 1894 discovered the bubonic plague bacillus and brilliantly elucidated the rat-flea-human epidemiology of the disease. He was not, however, a historian. Descriptions of the symptoms and progress of the Black Death were entirely consistent for over 300 years and have almost no similarities with modern medical accounts of bubonic plague, apart from the occurrence of buboes (swollen lymph nodes), which are found in at least a dozen other not-uncommon diseases.
I have little doubt that the Black Death was a viral haemorrhagic fever of the Ebola type, far more contagious and deadly than bubonic plague.
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It is disappointing that you can publish an article such as “Welcome to Fort Plague” (19 April, p 44), which perpetrates the myth that the Black Death was a bubonic plague, without at least referring to the earlier piece.
Dorrigo, New South Wales, Australia
