19:53
[Narrator] The quest for longevity is one as old as humanity itself. But what happens when this noble pursuit leads us down a perilous path? An ancient emperor's obsession with immortality turns into a deadly gamble. [Expert 1] This is a man so desperate to live forever that he embraces the very substance that will hasten his demise. [Narrator] Then, in a desperate bid to understand the true nature of the human form, a Renaissance scholar dares to challenge centuries of church sanctioned wisdom.
[Expert 2] His scalpel truly carves the path to modern medicine. [Narrator] And as the Black Death infiltrates Eurasia, medieval healers grasp at experimental remedies in an attempt to find a cure. [Expert 3] From self-flogging to bathing in human excrement, this was medicine's Wild West. [Narrator] In 1974, a group of Chinese farmers set out to dig a well in the drought-stricken province of Shaanxi. Instead, however, they uncover fragments of a forgotten world.
There amidst shards of clay and corroded bronze, a face emerges from the depths. The stoic terracotta stare of an ancient warrior. [Natasha Billson] The terracotta sculpture staring up at them is just one of thousands more standing guard outside the tomb of China's first emperor. [Anthea Nardi] This is perhaps one of the greatest archaeological finds in the history of China. [Narrator] Subsequent archaeological digs unearth an entire subterranean army guarding the eternal slumber of Emperor Qin Shi Huang.
And these warriors are not his only protectors, because, according to ancient texts, this sprawling 56-square-kilometer mausoleum is also embedded with a treacherous river. of mercury. [James Vincent] Gleaming mercury flowing through the emperor's resting place, an element that is long believed to be an elixir of immortality. In fact, this toxic metal is the emperor's supplement of choice. [Rachel Honeyghan-Williams] It's a concept that just doesn't fly in modern medicine. What drives the fascination with such a dangerous element?
[Billson] And what were its ultimate consequences not only for the emperor, but for the modern researchers who dare to probe his tomb? [Narrator] In the 3rd century BC, China is not the unified nation we recognize today, but a battleground of seven warring kingdoms, each vying for supremacy. But in 246 BC, a young boy ascends the throne of the Qin state, fated for a reign of profound importance. [Nardi] Ying Zheng succeeds his father to the throne at the age of 13. As he gets older, he becomes the unlikely figure that puts an end to this warring period of instability.
[Narrator] Under his order, a massive road system is built spanning all seven kingdoms. From centuries of chaos and devastation what emerges is a unified power-- the Empire of China. Following his successes, Ying Zheng proclaims himself the first divine emperor of Qin. [Nardi] Not only does this grant him absolute power, but this then associates him with divinity. [James Vincent] He implements massive economic changes and grand infrastructure projects including the Great Wall of China.
[Narrator] Despite his triumphs, Qin Shi Huang was haunted by a single torturous question: How could he hold on to his empire for eternity? Qin Shi Huang reportedly wanted his dynasty to endure for 10,000 generations, and he may have wished to live that long himself. How? Through the fabled elixir of everlasting life. [Nicholas Everett] The elixir of immortality, it's the ingestion over time of small amounts of these substances which transform your body into an immortal state.
[Sarah Duignan] Royals want to enshrine themselves in their society for as long as they can. They want to avoid death and maintain power. So it makes sense that they would be in search of this perfect cure-all substance. [Vincent] For the emperor, however, this endeavor becomes an obsession. All of a sudden, he's spending money trying to find the elixir. [Narrator] This fixation drives the emperor to extraordinary lengths, the evidence of which is discovered in 2002 when archaeologists uncover 35,000 bamboo slips from the time of his reign.
These ancient texts detail imperial decrees, demanding an empire-wide search for the elixir of life. [Nardi] The record suggests that Qin Shi Huang invited magicians from all across China to his imperial court. He sent others on grueling hikes to find magical herbs in the mountains. [Narrator] During this medical crusade, the emperor orders the renowned alchemist Xu Fu on a grand expedition to the Bohai Sea in search of the mythical island known as Penglai, a place supposedly home to supernatural entities known as the Immortals. Hoping to obtain their secrets, Xu Fu set sail, his fleet stocked with offerings. But after years of searching, he fails to ever reach Penglai.
Fearing imperial punishment, he convinces the emperor to fund one last attempt, and from this, he never returns. [Vincent] Some legends claim that Xu Fu reaches Japan and colonizes it. Others speculate this was all a ruse, a carefully planned escape from the emperor's impossible demands. [Narrator] The emperor's obsession leaves him vulnerable to fraud, as he's tricked time and time again by phony potions, promising eternal life. He soon orders the destruction of scholarly materials, sparing subjects that may be useful to his relentless hunt. Soon, any utterance of the emperor's death is considered a punishable offense.
[Vincent] The thing is, you're not gonna say no to the emperor. But as a result of that, they're going to be experimenting with foreign plants, metals, and embarking on this incredibly dangerous journey. The result was most likely death. [Narrator] As the emperor grapples with countless failures, one distilled ingredient will soon capture his attention-- a shimmering element known as water silver, or what we now call mercury. [Honeyghan-Williams] Mercury is a metallic element that is naturally occurring, but one thing that's really special about it is that at room temperature, it's in liquid form.
[Narrator] This tantalizing ingredient is sourced from reserves of cinnabar, a red mineral mined from the earth in areas across the empire. [Nardi] Cinnabar is used in ancient medicine not only in China, but other parts of the world. [Honeyghan-Williams] Many ancient civilizations realized that if you heat cinnabar, it releases mercury in the form of vapor. That vapor can then be condensed on a cold surface into this liquid quicksilver state. [Narrator] Once its mesmerizing fluid form is revealed, mercury earns a new reputation as the potential catalyst to a prolonged life.
[Everett] Mercury has the particular property of creating amalgams with other metals and, and also helps to purify them, so it's easy to apply that to a medical context, where you could say that the use of mercury might purify the body. [Narrator] Qin Shi Huang is said to regularly consume beverages and pills infused with mercury-laden cinnabar, with the hope that this potion will grant him a prolonged stay in the physical realm. [Honeyghan-Williams] There's just one problem with using mercury or cinnabar as a medicine, and that is that it's highly toxic. So you start building up a really severe repertoire of symptoms that in ancient times were basically seen as madness.
[Mazyar Fallah] You can have very big mood swings. You can hear voices, hallucinate, and you get very paranoid, you can get very angry. [Duignan] It begins a process of attacking your body from the inside out. So it attacks the brain and shuts down the neurons. And then you have a whole host of nervous system reactions as a response to ingesting it over time. [Narrator] Yet the enchanting appeal of mercury overshadows any valuation of risk. [Everett] Even though people could see that this thing didn't work, they continued to believe in it, because it was enshrined in the culture in a great deal of myth and legend.
[Narrator] Despite his fervent battle with death, Qin Shi Huang begins the monumental task of constructing his royal tomb. According to the ancient historian Sima Qian, this project takes nearly four decades to complete. The result is a grand complex and contains stables, parks, and all comforts for a pleasant afterlife. [Vincent] Sima Qian, who lived a century after the emperor, claims that 700,000 men built his complex. That's seven times the number of people that Greek historians believe constructed the Great Pyramid of Giza.
[Narrator] Though many modern historians assume this may be an exaggerated tale, the continuous unearthing of this vast complex adds convincing support to this claim. Hundreds of pits house a formidable army of life-sized terracotta warriors, each hand-sculpted in the image of a man. [Nardi] While they've uncovered around 2,000 statues, it's estimated that there could be an additional 6,000 more. [Billson] This is the largest royal burial site on Earth. It's the size of a small city, and it will remain completely hidden to the world for over two millennia.
[Narrator] Despite decades of excavation, one part of this vast complex remains untouched, the central tomb where Qin Shi Huang is believed to rest. According to Sima's text, the emperor's mausoleum contains waterways of quicksilver, all flowing in the image of the great rivers of China. [Honeyghan-Williams] Why would the emperor create a reproduction of his empire using a toxic substance? More importantly, is it even true? Or could it be a fantastical tale from an ancient writer?
[Duignan] Knowing that the emperor drank mercury throughout his life, is it possible that using that in his tomb was a way of continuing that preservation of his soul in the afterlife? [Fallah] Mercury, because it was a shiny liquid metal, was thought to have a lot of mystical powers. The mystical powers would keep out grave robbers, would keep out bad spirits, would protect the vessel that his body was. [Narrator] In the 1980s, researchers decide to investigate these curious claims. What they find are soil samples pulled from the burial mound, containing mercury concentrations far higher than anywhere else on site.
A further survey conducted in 2003 confirms these results. Scientists estimate that the tomb may have once contained around 100 tons of this lethal liquid, an exposure level that would pose serious health risks to anyone involved in its construction. Ironically, it's possible that no one understood these painful side effects better than Qin Shi Huang himself. [Billson] There's reasons to believe that the constant ingestion of this so-called "medicine" is what underpins the emperor's fanatical behavior in his later years. [Narrator] According to historical records, including those written by Sima Qian, Qin Shi Huang grows increasingly paranoid of those around him. As he descends into murderous tyranny, he orders the construction of hidden roads and tunnels
to shield his movements across the empire. Anyone caught leaking his whereabouts faces certain execution. [Duignan] There were several attempts on his life throughout his life. He's also building a large empire across China, and so in doing that, starts to make more enemies. So it makes sense that he would be paranoid for his life. [Fallah] His regimen of taking mercury is only going to make this paranoia and anxiety worse. It's harder for him to regulate his emotions, so anything that would make him anxious, maybe he can't break out of that anxiety.
[Narrator] In the summer of 210 BC, while traveling in secrecy, Qin Shi Huang unexpectedly draws his final breath. [Everett] The irony there is he dies at the age of 49, probably from the very thing that he was trying to use to gain immortality, and that is the quicksilver. [Honeyghan-Williams] Even as the awareness of the toxic nature of the ingredients grows over time, the popularity of eternal elixirs persists. In fact, Chinese rulers and elites continue to intentionally consume these deadly concoctions for another 2,000 years. [Narrator] His death leaves behind an empire short on scholars and innovation, a fragile legacy that quickly crumbles into chaos, reigniting a period of fragmented power.
Today, scientists approach the emperor's tomb with a mix of fascination and fear, acutely aware of the concealed toxins lurking within its depths. [Nardi] Beyond the threat of mercury exposure, there is also the threat of letting air and water into the tomb, potentially causing damage to artifacts that have been held within for thousands of years. [Billson] There is reason to believe the emperor's tomb is filled with even more precious artifacts than what's already been recovered.
The true extent of what remains inside the tomb, we may never really know. [Narrator] For now, the tomb of Qin Shi Huang remains untouchable, just as he so once desperately sought to be. The fascination with life and death has permeated cultures across time and space, and it will reach new heights in Renaissance Europe, as one scholar dares to unlock the secrets lurking beneath our own skin. [Christian Knudsen] We take for granted that today we understand how the body works. We know what organs are in the body.
We know where they're even placed. But for thousands of years, this was a mystery. [Madeleine Mant] To really fully understand the human body, you have to look inside. And in a period that is dominated by religious dogma, to do so is actually an act of sacrilege. [Narrator] For over a millennium, the progress of Western anatomical studies sits frozen in time, shackled by religious doctrine and deeply ingrained taboos. [Vincent] How did we remain tethered to teachings of antiquity for so long? And what does it take to finally ignite the anatomical revolution?
[Narrator] Long viewed as a scaffold of flesh and bone, a sacred temple to protect the human spirit, accessing the true internal machinery is a realm of knowledge reserved for the gods. [Mant] Dissection is the act of opening the human body to access and observe the internal structures. In much of the ancient world, the act of opening a human body would be a violation of the sacred laws. In ancient Greece, for instance, a human corpse is considered a source of pollution, so to interact with the corpse is to pollute oneself.
[Nardi] Because of this, the concept of dissection is essentially foreign to many ancient scholars. [Knudsen] There were so many reasons not to cut open a body, very few reasons to open a body. Generally, during the Middle Ages, the average university-trained doctor would probably know where the big organs were, but lots of it was a mystery or only understood at a theoretical level. [Narrator] Yet, in the 3rd century BC, a profound shift takes place with the founding of Alexandria. In the pursuit of advancing human knowledge, Alexandria quickly establishes itself as the intellectual capital of the known world.
Soon, new ideas take hold, which allowed two pioneering physicians, Herophilus and his disciple Erasistratus, to venture where none had gone before. For the first time in recorded history, they systematically dissect human cadavers. [Mant] We think that these two scholars were allowed to go around these social taboos because they had the support of Alexandria's leaders, who really wanted to progress the medical sciences. In his dissections, Herophilus is able to actually describe the digestive system and the reproductive system, as well as the inner structures of the eye. Importantly, he also notes that the brain is the center of intelligence, not the heart, which is what Aristotle had been saying.
[Narrator] Yet it would be Galen of Pergamon, born four centuries later, who would revolutionize the science of anatomy and conduct the most influential works in ancient medicine, shaping medical thought for over a millennium. [Nardi] Galen has this insatiable curiosity about the human body, and he's determined to find that each individual organ has its own function. [Knudsen] Famously, he also performed both dissections and vivisections, where an animal is cut open while it's still alive. And according to stories, he would do this in an almost theatrical way with an audience, and he would use this as a way of teaching
at the same time as studying for himself. [Vincent] He authors over 600 treatises, covering topics from the valves of the heart to the functionings of the uterus. In one of his procedures, he takes a live pig and traces the nerves along the spinal cord, showcasing the mastery over the body's systems. [Mant] In another instance, he apparently is disemboweling a monkey, and then puts it all back together to restore its health. These public dissections were available to everybody. Everybody has a body. People were interested in what was going on inside them, but they really didn't have any access to it otherwise.
[Narrator] While groundbreaking for its time, Galen's work will be the last leap of meaningful progress for centuries. The influence of Christianity spreads across the continent as Europe enters the medieval era. By the 5th century AD, the Library of Alexandria, once the crown jewel of ancient learning, succumbs to centuries of political upheaval and religious conflict. [Nardi] The destruction of the Library of Alexandria leads to a tremendous loss of scholarly texts and works. The church becomes the primary authority of knowledge, and the pursuit of new ideas takes a backseat to religious doctrine.
[Everett] We have a profound intellectual change in which medicine has to find a new locus, and it certainly now has to compete with the idea of a benevolent god. [Vincent] Disease is widely perceived as this divine punishment, with prayer and devotion often prescribed as the ultimate remedy. [Narrator] In the field of anatomy, human dissection grows increasingly controversial. While not explicitly outlawed, a series of papal edicts tarnishes its reputation, pushing it to the fringe of acceptability.
In 1163, Pope Alexander III delivers a proclamation that reverberates through the halls of medical learning. "The church abhors blood." [Mant] Pope Alexander's decree is meant to prohibit clerics from busying themselves in the physical world. They should be spending all of their time thinking about the spiritual world. This gets misinterpreted as a ban on clerics studying medicine or anatomy, and then eventually as a ban on dissection more broadly. In 1299, Pope Boniface puts out another decree.
This one is forbidding the dismemberment of soldiers who've returned from the Holy Crusades, but this is again misinterpreted as a ban on dissection. [Fallah] Interpretations change the further away you get from the source. People in other parts of Europe couldn't ask him what he meant, and if it wasn't put down as specific rules to follow, then it's always safer to take it in the broadest definition. [Knudsen] This is a problem, because it is the clergy, in fact, who are the only ones who have any training in medical expertise at all.
They are the ones who are being trained at university to be doctors. [Narrator] It won't be until the 14th century that observational practice is encouraged once again. [Mant] First, only one or two dissections can take place in a year, and they must be on the corpse of an executed criminal. This is really to emphasize that those who defy the sacred laws in life can face this corporeal destruction after death.
[Narrator] Guiding these rare experiments are the words of Galen, his texts long preserved within the hallowed halls of European monasteries. Though centuries have passed, his observations are regarded as the supreme word of medical knowledge. [Everett] To know Galenic text and to be questioned on them, to be tested on them, was to know medicine. And if you didn't do that, you could not be a qualified doctor. [Knudsen] If there was a discrepancy between an ancient authority like Galen and something that you were seeing practically on the ground, then the mistake had to be on you.
The ancient text could never be wrong. [Vincent] Galen's very work that once pushed the boundaries of human understanding now serves as the chains that bind it. [Narrator] It will take a younger scholar of the Renaissance, Andreas Vesalius, to finally challenge the entrenched understanding of anatomy, daring to trust his own eyes over the wisdom of the past. During this period, dissections are hierarchical, with low ranking individuals, often barbers, performing the cutting, while the professor reads aloud from Galen's text.
[Mant] Vesalius does not agree with this system, and he insists on doing his own dissections and recording his own observations. [Fallah] This isn't like doing a surgery. It's not clean. The body is decomposing. It's going to be smelly. There's going to be risk of infection to you. If you want to think of some of the most unpleasant things you could possibly do, it would be doing a dissection at this point in time. [Knudsen] The idea of cutting in surgery, that was considered menial work, not something that a university-trained doctor would expose himself to.
Vesalius flips that on its head. He emphasizes that the real knowledge comes from the dissection. He places all the importance on that, and it's from his work that our understanding of the human body is completely revolutionized. [Narrator] This pursuit culminates in his magnum opus, "De Humani Corporis Fabrica." Published in 1543, a text with detailed illustrations that not only revolutionizes anatomy, but exposes one of the greatest medical misconceptions in European history. [Mant] Through his work, Vesalius starts to find huge inaccuracies in this foundational principles of anatomy. In fact, he finds over 200 places where Galen had got it wrong.
[Everett] One of the great problems with Galen's anatomy is that he never dissected human beings, as far as we know. He always used animals. And so many of his anatomical descriptions of the human body are relying on the anatomy of a pig. [Narrator] With each precise incision, Vesalius dismantles centuries of Galenic tradition. [Vincent] The very foundation of human anatomy was a sham. Differentiating the human body from that of our animal neighbors was a massive step into understanding just how we function.
[Knudsen] Vesalius, in publishing his work, is essentially saying everything you know, everything that medical science has understood for the past 2,000 years is wrong. It was shocking, and it changed everything. [Narrator] Vesalius becomes the first thinker to accurately describe the human anatomy by championing observational evidence, rather than ingrained beliefs. But such detailed revisions of the human form comes at a price. But as the hunger for knowledge grows, so too does the demand for cadavers. [Mant] While using the body of somebody who had been executed for committing a crime was socially acceptable at the time, procuring corpses of people who had died
from natural, accidental causes was absolutely not. [Nardi] A cadaver is only suitable for dissection for up to three or four days. Anything beyond those three to four days, the decomposition process would begin, and it would be unbearable for the person performing the dissection. [Narrator] For many, these practical constraints lead to desperate measures, prompting some to rob graves, harass funeral processions, or even murder in order to bag a body while still warm.
Despite his esteemed academic position, even Vesalius cannot avoid this ethically murky path reportedly procuring stolen bodies and encouraging his students to do the same. [Knudsen] Whether he actually did engage in actual stealing of corpses, or whether these are just criticisms leveled upon him against his enemies who disagreed with what he was doing, it doesn't really matter, because at the end of the day, there were very few bodies that he could find, and this might have been the only way for him to do it. [Narrator] According to some accounts, his investigations may even extend beyond the deceased, with one controversial claim suggesting Vesalius performs
a grim dissection on a Spanish nobleman while his heart is still beating. [Mant] So you can imagine that even the suggestion that a vivisection had happened on a human subject would be met with outright condemnation. [Narrator] In 1564, Vesalius embarks on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Some speculate this is punishment for his rumored vivisection. Others say it was his effort to atone for his sins. To this day, the motivations of his trek remain unknown, but it's a voyage from which he will never return.
Regardless of the conditions under which his works are produced, Vesalius initiates a medical revolution, setting the foundations for what we know about the human body today. [Mant] Vesalius' work really exemplifies the idea of skepticism, which is really important for modern empirical science. [Knudsen] It's important to remember that Vesalius wasn't perfect. He made a number of errors, but without the careful dissection of human bodies, it would all be conjecture.
It would all be just a theory. [Narrator] Though Vesalius begins to pierce the veil of Dark Age medicine, for centuries before him, scholars would stumble blindly through a landscape of disease and death. In the late 1340s, an invisible terror began to creep across Europe. Silent, merciless, and unstoppable. It became one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, sweeping through the continent in less than a decade and leaving behind a trail of unimaginable loss. [Knudsen] The disease caused the lymph nodes in the armpits, the groin and the neck to swell up, fill with pus and fluid, and then they would often turn black.
It's from the blackening of these buboes, as they were called, that we get the name that we know the disease by today, the Black Death. [Mant] The Black Death of the 14th century is an enormous catastrophe. In just a few years, we think it kills about 200 million people in Europe, Asia and Africa. [Honeyghan-Williams] Perhaps the most concerning aspect of this plague is that its cause and cure remain a mystery for such a long time.
[Billson] Is this disease caused by an imbalance of bodily fluids, as ancient theories suggest, or is it divine punishment? More importantly, how exactly could it be stopped? [Narrator] From the sign of initial symptoms, it takes a mere three days for a victim to go from apparent health to the footstep of death's door. [Honeyghan-Williams] Not everyone who's exposed to the plague is relegated to death. In fact, some people don't even catch the disease, even when they've been exposed. For those that do, the mortality is believed to be as high as 95%.
[Mant] There are two forms of plague we're talking about when we say the Black Death; there's the pneumonic form, which is spread by coughing and sneezing between people, and the bubonic form, which is named for those buboes. The speed at which this infection can take over the human body is particularly terrifying. There are stories of people realizing that they've been infected, and then just dressing themselves in their own funeral shrouds. [Knudsen] The pneumonic form was the fastest. We have stories of people dying within 10 to 12 hours after developing their very first symptoms.
The bubonic form might see a victim last much longer, often in terrible, terrible agony. Enough to know that their death was certain, but also to know there was nothing they could do about it. [Narrator] At the plague's zenith, medieval healers and citizens are left in the dark with nowhere to turn but superstition and the wisdom of antiquity's greatest minds. At the heart of medical theory in the Middle Ages is the four humors, a concept devised by ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and later championed and refined by Galen of Pergamon. [Fallah] Coming out of the Greek medical philosophies, they believed that there were four humors in the body--
blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm-- and these needed to be in balance for a healthy body. And as long as you balance these humors, you can cure any illness. [Knudsen] So doctors at the time tried to interpret the Black Death through that lens. The solutions that they experimented with were basically trying to restore that balance. [Duignan] The weight of the four humors was significant not only from a medical perspective, but from a social and a cultural and a religious perspective.
[Narrator] When treating illness, healers employ a range of techniques to restore its delicate balance, including purging and bloodletting, to drain excess fluids and return the body to its ideal state. [Mant] Physicians would use a tool called a fleam to make an incision, usually in and around the elbow, and then the blood would be let out. In other cases, they actually used leeches. In fact, the demand for leeches is so great that certain species are nearly hunted to extinction. [Honeyghan-Williams] Bloodletting and the entire concept of the four humors is thought to be entirely incorrect and ineffective.
However, it still remains common practice for over 1,000 years because of ingrained beliefs and habits. [Narrator] Physicians find themselves overwhelmed and ill equipped to battle this deadly scourge. Retreating to their ancient texts, they explore other avenues, pulling an eclectic array of food, plant, and mineral-based remedies to be mixed in experimental tinctures. [Billson] One of the most popular treatments is known as "Four Thieves Vinegar," a concoction of vinegar, garlic, herbs, and spices.
Other healers experiment with plants like sage, chamomile, saffron, and even the bones of animals. [Narrator] The most prized animal appendage of all is the fabled horn of the unicorn. [Knudsen] Unicorns were believed to be real during the Middle Ages. They were considered magical creatures that just simply didn't exist close to the fringes where most people lived. However, we can imagine unscrupulous practitioners grinding up all sorts of things and calling them unicorn horns. [Mant] Cures like horns or crushed-up emeralds would, of course, only have been available to the elite.
So poorer people, who are also trying to find minerals and gems to drink and eat, would be, unfortunately, turning to things like arsenic and mercury, which have toxic effects. [Narrator] In the 11th century, physician Avicenna proposed an early form of germ theory, a concept largely overlooked in his time. His medical texts later inspired Black Death treatments, including the use of fowl. [Mant] Prior to the Black Death, Avicenna is already writing about chicken-based cures.
He talks about chicken broth and how that can help to balance the humors, as well as using chicken parts to apply to the body. [Narrator] Made popular by doctors like Thomas Vicary, physicians pluck the rumps of these domesticated birds and strap their exposed skin to the swollen nodes of the sick. [Mant] It's believed that chickens can withstand a lot of poison, because their diet is just eating things that are scattered on the ground.
It's also believed that chickens breathe through their bottoms, so potentially by strapping their cloaca onto the wound or onto the bubo, it can actually draw out and suck in some of the poison. [Knudsen] Desperate times called for desperate measures. And if you thought that having a writhing, dying chicken tied to your chest would save you, well, you might do it, too. [Narrator] The blatant misunderstanding of this contagion even leads some to the use of human excrement on their open sores; each pustule lathered and bound with cloth in an undoubtedly harmful attempt at a cure.
[Fallah] The idea is that like draws like. So if you had an open sore, tying something to it that was even worse, like feces, all of the badness that was in your open sore would go to the bigger source. We know that feces aren't the cleanest things, and you don't want to rub that on yourself in any way, shape, or form. [Billson] Without knowing the true cause of this devastating plague, finding an effective cure seems near impossible. [Narrator] As the wealthy wield their privilege, stockpiling supposed remedies and fleeing infected areas, they unknowingly become vectors of the very disease they seek to escape.
[Duignan] The transmission of the Black Death wasn't well known, particularly in the first waves. It was difficult for people to understand how the disease could spread so rapidly and where it was coming from. The ideas that we have today of protections that we would put in place, they just weren't there at that point. [Honeyghan-Williams] There's so much focus on treating the symptoms that people tend to overlook the root cause of transmission. So you've got the wealthy fleeing crowded cities and often taking the disease with them. And then you've got poor and working class people, nowhere else to go, so they stay in cramped and unsanitary conditions.
This is the perfect breeding ground for the plague. [Narrator] Theories abound about the true cause of the plague, ranging from changes in the weather to witchcraft to the movement of the planets. But one explanation towers above all. [Billson] In medieval Europe, religion permeates every aspect of life, and many interpret the Black Death as divine punishment. [Mant] When the plague is interpreted as the wrath of God, people turn to quite a spiritual panic. People pray publicly.
They hold onto amulets for salvation. They form these mass gatherings to prayer, which of course would have spread the plague even further. [Fallah] Our brains aren't wired to think that things happen without a reason. You got a plague. It keeps coming back every summer. Large numbers of people are dying. Nobody knows what's causing it. Nothing seems to be helping about it. You're going to give it a cause, and that cause is something you can't see.
[Narrator] Soon the streets become a stage for religious zealots to display their penance. Flagellants march from town to town, their backs exposed as they publicly whip themselves with knotted, nail-embedded ropes. [Knudsen] The idea that one needs to purify your original sin through some form of self-mortification had been practiced for centuries already. It's not surprising in the least, that many people then turned to flagellation as a way of somehow making it even with God.
All of this, though, really just comes down to a basic, desperate desire to live. [Narrator] Within a few years of reaching European soil, the Black Death unleashes unprecedented disaster. One third of the continent's population lies dead, their bodies piling up in heaps on city streets. Decay permeates the air, a stench perceived not just as an indication of disease but believed to be disease itself. [Knudsen] On a good day, a modern person would be vomiting within two minutes if you were transported back to medieval London and you were walking down a thoroughfare. And then when you imagine the Black Death and the thousands and thousands of corpses
being thrown into pits, it must have been absolutely horrific. [Mant] Ancient thinkers like Hippocrates and Galen write about something called miasma, or bad air. This idea that disease is actually being spread by the smells. [Honeyghan-Williams] To clear the miasma, people came up with a number of different methods. They were cutting up onions, burning incense, and fumigating their homes with smoke. While it's somewhat misguided, this does indicate a level of understanding that disease can spread through respiration.
[Narrator] Among those who subscribe to this belief are the physicians of Pope Clement VI, who, in an attempt to ward off the lethal miasma, urge him to retreat to his chamber and sit isolated on a throne between two raging fires. [Billson] This strange practice is rooted in the belief that intense fire can destroy disease, and remarkably, there may be some scientific merit to this approach. The extreme heat likely deters plague-carrying fleas, and high temperature can indeed kill bacteria. [Knudsen] And in the end, it worked.
The pope manages to get through the plague without dying. [Narrator] The Black Death leaves a harrowing mark on Europe, reshaping its demographics, economy, and the very course of Western medical history. [Mant] Today, we know that the Black Death is caused by Yersinia pestis. This is a bacterium that wasn't discovered until the 19th century. Thankfully, today we have antibiotics, so if you catch the plague, you can certainly be cured. [Fallah] At the same time, we're starting to see things where antibiotics aren't working. And that's starting to cause a worry,
because we can go back to having plagues if the bacteria evade the antibiotics. [Narrator] Yet perhaps the most significant consequence of all is the stark awakening to medieval medicine's limitations. [Knudsen] It's easy to dismiss medicine in the Middle Ages as being something that is based on quackery or superstition. But really, medieval doctors were troubleshooting within the confines of what they knew. So rather than seeing something like tying a chicken to one's body as ridiculous, you should see it as an example of the lengths to which medieval doctors will go to, to save someone's life.
[Narrator] From the seemingly bizarre treatments of the plague to the forbidden mysteries of the human body, and the deadly droplets of a fabled elixir, these weren't just medical failures, but lessons in the cost of certainty without evidence. With every misguided cure, every risky dissection, every toxic remedy, lies medicine's greatest triumph, learning to doubt ourselves just enough to eventually find the truth.
