http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheBlackDeath

Scott Westerfeld, The Last Days , The Last Days "'Ring around the rosie. A pocketful of posie. Ashes ashes, we all fall down.' Some people say that this poem is about the Black Death, the fourteenth-century plague that killed 100-million people... Sadly, though, most experts think this is nonsense... How can I be so sure about this rhyme when all the experts disagree? Because I ate the kid who made it up."

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The pathogen Yersinia pestis , believed to have originated in Central Asia, has caused some of the deadliest pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between 1348 and 1350 in the Great Pestilence with strains continuing until the 1700s. Both the event and the disease are also known by the name given by later writers, The Black Death. Experienced by the whole of Eurasian/Mediterranean civilization to some degree, it so traumatized the human race that the formal name the disease was given in Europe, derived from the Latin words for to strike down, and to lamentnote plaga and plangere respectively, is to this day synonymous with both "widespread threat to society" and "lethal contagious disease": The Plague. It's believed that an outright majority of Europe and Asia's population was killed by this outbreak, making it proportionally the single deadliest event in recorded history.

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Keep in mind that the disease is not called the "bubonic plague"; it's simply "plague". "Bubonic" is merely one way the disease plays out: by infecting the lymph system and colonizing the lymph nodes, which swell up into "bubos". In coastal areas, the most common form of plague at that time was pneumonic plague, which affects the lungs. Septicemic plague affects the bloodstream. The difference? Pneumonic plague kills all but a handful of sufferers, mostly within a week of the first symptoms. Septicemic plague is always fatal and can kill within hours of the first symptoms appearing, and may even kill before any symptoms occur. note Even with the prompt intervention of modern medicine, the survival rate only goes up to 15%. Bubonic plague victims, on the other hand, can take days or even weeks to die, and around one-third actually survive with long lasting traumatic damage to their internal organs and immune systems- with the effect of making these victims the most noticeable and horrifying.

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The disturbing explanation for the disease's alternate name, the black death, is that in both the septisemic and bubonic presentations, the victims are left in a horrific swollen and decaying state due to a combination of ruptured lymph nodes and frostbite-like patches of black gangrene —before they die. Following the plague pandemic, this image was so burned into Europe's psyche that it spawned our modern visualization of The Undead, a stark contrast to the prior depictions of liches and kin as unusually pale but otherwise unremarkable, animalistic, or totally skeletal.

There have been many other outbreaks of plague other than the 1348-1350 pandemic. The most recent occurred at the beginning of the 20th century, killing tens of millions in India and China, and the earliest outbreak for which we have definitive historical evidence (at least according to some historians) is The Plague of Justinian in the 6th Century. The growing use of antibiotics and the improvement of hygiene conditions have ensured no pandemic of such scale can happen anymore in most modern countries, but there are still limited outbreaks in the areas where there's a lack of these.

When this appears in a story you know things are quickly going to go downhill for the heroes (if there even are heroes). Due to its transcending memories of death, destruction, and desperation, such stories generally have a Downer Ending. It tends to be used because to most cultures, death is feared and a reminder of our own mortality is chilling.

Compare: The Spanish Flu, COVID-19 Pandemic.

See also The Plague for devastating pandemics in general. For more on the science and history of the plague, see the Other Wiki.

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

Examples:

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Anime

Problem Children Are Coming from Another World, Aren't They? has one of the characters being the Moe Anthropomorphism of The Black Death, Black Percher with her real name being Pestilence/Pest.

God Child has a small arc that revolved around a woman who was mistaken to be a vampire due to the amount of deaths that have been on the rise and her looking incredibly young for a lady in her 40s at the time, but it's revealed that the people died due to the plague and she had no real part in it.

Comic Books

In Robin Vol 1 the biological weapon Edmund Dorrance gets his hands on is revealed to be the black death, which an old Nazi scientist had managed to recreate and which Dorrance somehow heard of and sent his hired help to go track down.

Fan Works

Big Human on Campus reveals that witches were responsible for the Black Death in their cycle of Disproportionate Retribution with humans, much to Yukari's horror.

The Day of the Barney Trilogy reveals that Barney is responsible for this.

Film

Folklore

Modern folklore has it that the Nursery Rhyme "Ring Around the Rosie" is actually a description of the Black Death. As any folklorist will tell you, this is a "Just So" Story supported by no historical evidence. Snopes has a debunking.

In Northern Europe, the effect of the black death was so severe it held the population down for centuries. It didn`t help much that the disease showed up time and again all the way to 1650. In Norway especially, people came to see the plague incarnate as an old hag, clad in dark clothes, wearing a broom and a rake. Her face was either a skull or made of decomposing flesh. Tradition has it that she usually saved some if she used the rake. On the other hand, if she used the broom, no one was spared. Based on Truth in Television in the more remote parts of Norway and possibly Sweden, where the entire population of some valleys were found dead after the plague, and were not repopulated for 200 years. In one particular case, a lone hunter just accidentally stumbled over the local church, still standing in the middle of nowhere. In the meantime, the building was made a hive for bears. The bearskin allegedly still hangs on the wall in this particular church. The most known depiction of the Plague Hag (Pesta) was made in the late nineteenth century by Norwegian painter Theodor Kittelsen, who claimed to have met her in a dark wood near his home. And he ran really fast on his way home. He claimed she looked like this ◊ .

Romani Mythology: The black death is personified as the cat and dog headed Poreskoro. This is not as cute as it sounds.

Some versions of the classic "Vanishing Hotel Room" urban legend end with the explanation that the sick mother/daughter was vanished because she had a deadly disease, and the hotel/city wished to prevent a mass panic. If the disease is specified, it's usually the Black Death.

Literature

Live Action TV

Music

Seanan McGuire's cheery Filk Song "The Black Death" argues for the theory that the Black Death was not in fact Y. Pestis: Speaking epidemiologically, bubonic plague doesn't make sense to me. Yersinia pestis gets you dead, it's true, but it isn't as effective as the common flu. If you want to wipe out half of Europe's population, you'll need a better agent for your devastation; You need a viral agent that is tried and tragic — let's take a look at fevers that are hemorrhagic.

The whole album A Chronicle of the Plague as well as the track "Breath of the Black Plague" from the album Twilight of Europe by the Ukrainian minimalist dark ambient band Dark Ages are all about the subject.

Podcast

The Twilight Histories episode Mask of the Plague Doctor takes place in Medieval Florence in 1348, the year the plague arrived in Italy.

Theatre

The Black Death plays a small but decisive role in Romeo and Juliet. The reason Friar Laurence's letter never reaches Romeo is that the messenger got stuck in a plague quarantine.

Video Games

Webcomics

Western Animation

Since Il était une fois... l'homme tells the story of Western civilization from prehistoric times to modern times, it's no surprise that the Black Death is inescapable. Specifically, it is shown in Episode 13, which is about The Hundred Years War.

Real Life