Garlic in History, Medicinal uses and cooking

The Black Plague Struck Europe by the late 1340's from Asia. It is guessed that by 1437 the Black Death had decimated Europe's population by at least 30% to 60%, causing between 25 and 50 MILLION deaths in Europe alone.

Those are pretty scary numbers but some people survived in Paris and I'm going to tell you how they did it.

Paris was hit by the plague around 1437, rats brought it to land from ships from the orient via Sicily. The rats spread through Europe first in Sicily then to the ports where ships would dock and the rats would climb off the ship and scamper across the bow and stern lines. Fleas infested the rats and spread the disease. The fleas became carriers of the disease and soon infected the human population.

This truly horrible disease was untreatable, it took a while to die and eventually death came after the bodies blood vessels hemorrhaged and the skin became black in color, hence the name "Black Death".

In Paris the poor parts of the city with the most rats was the first to be infected. The dead were put upon wagons and hauled to a place where deep pits had been dug. They were piled into the pits and buried.

Soon the middle class became infected and as the city died no one was willing to pull the death carts to the pits to be buried. The city officials had a plan and went to the cities prisons and took the prisoners out of their cells to pull the wagons.

There was a difference between the nobility and the lower classes. the lower classes depended on folk medicine or the local witch to give them brews and tinctures for their illnesses. One of these cures just happened to work, according to history.

The prisoners were given crushed garlic soaked in wine to drink every day by their families. They ate as much garlic as they could stomach and pulled the corpses out of the buildings and hauled them away to be buried in the pits.

So the story goes, the prisoners who pulled those carts did not get sick. Ah, the power of Garlic!

This nursery rhyme penned sometime around 1340 is about the Black Death.

Ring around the Rosy,
A pocket full of Posies,
Ashes, Ashes, we all fall down

A ring around the rosy means that huge boils would appear under the arm, flaring dark red with a ring around them. Later these boils would burst and puss would ooze from them. They were very painful.

A pocket full of posies were the flowers (perhaps garlic blossoms) that people would put around the dying victim.

Ashes, Ashes was either the rain of ashes from the burning city or the ashes from the burning of the countless people of Paris who had died.

"We all fall down" meant that all would die. As did more than 30 to 50% of Europe.