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Has anyone read this book that proposes the "black death" was due to meteor/comet strikes? I have been interested in doing so but never got around to it.

http://www.amazon.com/Light-Black-Death-Mike-Baillie/dp/0752...

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Glanced at the abstract, and the amazon reviews. The medieval medical guilds were well aware of the clinical symptoms of the Black Death, so I wonder how Mike Baillie connects the characteristic buboes of the plague with meteor strikes?

I enjoyed reading this paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632865/

The paper highlights several aspects of plague that were different between the second and third plague pandemic, and which caused a scientific movement that searched for alternative explanations for the Black Death - that is, until the Yersinia pestis bacterium got sequenced from multiple Black Death mass graves.

I'm not familiar with the arguments in the book, but in general it could be both. The impacts could disrupt society (eg via crop failure) which leads to a breakdown of sanitary practices and poverty which leads to spread of disease.

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