A nice article, Nicol; thanks for writing. The Black Death was truly devastating, and struck people already enfeebled by a wide variety of environmental insults. Today we’re the authors of our own weakness, as so many of us are fat and indolent with immune systems overwhelmed by a consumption of deeply unhealthy foods and a wide variety of unnecessary metabolic ailments. We’ve made ourselves overly-vulnerable to even relatively minor infections, and we’re apparently unable to cope psychologically with the idea that the very old and the very sick will in fact die of something in the near future. I wonder what those who lived through the plague would make of our pampered modern sensibilities?