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Worcester Medicine
FROM THE EDITOR
President's Message
An Introduction to Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague,
1500-1800
A Pale Horse :Art
Responds to the Plague: Depicting Symptomatology, Identifying Remedies AIDS:
A Twentieth Century Plague
A Modern Understanding of the Plague of Fourteenth Century Europe DID YOU KNOW
Art and
Medicine: A Cross-Discipline Collaboration Plague has come before – and undoubtedly will come again – in some infectious form capable of destroying whole families and entire nations. Reflection on plague goes beyond medicine, touching upon elements of the entire human experience. This issue of Worcester Medicine is about plague and is presented in collaboration with the Worcester Art Museum and its exhibition Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500 – 1800. James A. Welu, Director of the Worcester Art Museum, discusses how the Italian artwork, gathered by the Museum from over thirty galleries, deals with the human condition when it is confronted by plague. Franco Mormando, Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Boston College, describes the artwork’s subtle visual depiction of human affliction while capturing the immense dread that defined the time of the plague. Dr. Robert Finberg, Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine, and recognized expert on infectious diseases, cleverly illuminates the association between the deadly culprit Yersinia pestis and pestilence. Drs. Anthony L. Esposito and Jane A. Lochrie, both outstanding clinicians at the Worcester Medical Center, draw frightening parallels between the plagues of the Middle Ages and the present day plague of HIV illness. Sande Bishop, a respected scholar from the Worcester community, prefaces her memorable historical piece on plague with provocative lines from Boccacio. I extend a special thanks to Marie Costello, Assistant Curator for Special Projects at the Worcester Art Museum, to members of the Editorial Board and especially to Joyce Cariglia, Executive Director of the Worcester District Medical Society, for their invaluable efforts in realizing this extraordinary collaboration. President's Message Dear Colleagues, After 14 years, Dr. J. Paul Lock is stepping down as Editor of Worcester Medicine in order to pursue other interests. On behalf of the Worcester District Medical Society, I extend a most heartfelt thanks and our appreciation to Paul for his dedication and commitment and for devoting his valuable time to the publication. Please join me in wishing him well for the future. With gratitude,
An Introduction to Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague,
1500-1800 Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500-1800, is the first exhibition in North America to examine the response of the visual arts to plague. The Worcester Art Museum is pleased to collaborate with a number of Worcester institutions in undertaking this pioneering exhibition. The exhibition and catalogue are presented in partnership with Clark University and the College of the Holy Cross. We especially appreciate the opportunity to work with the Worcester District Medical Society on connecting this subject with our own time, particularly through collaboration on this special issue of Worcester Medicine. The intersection of scientific knowledge and spiritual needs that is investigated in this exhibition will prove an engaging subject for the medical community as well as for the general public. The curators, Gauvin Alexander Bailey (Clark University), Pamela Jones (UMass Boston), Franco Mormando (Boston College) and Thomas Worcester (College of the Holy Cross), have researched contemporary documents, personal correspondence, medical treatises, chronicles, poetry, sermons, chapbooks and biblical commentaries to reveal the everyday life and aspirations of those afflicted by The Plague. The artworks are drawn from thirty museums and private collectors, from both here and abroad, for this thematically-based exhibition. Exploring the ways in which Italian society responded to this recurring, unpredictable disaster illuminates a variety of aesthetic, social, and religious concerns. While former exhibitions have explored the health and political consequences of The Plague, Hope and Healing emphasizes the realm of the spiritual. Spiritual remedies (rimedi spirituali) such as fasting, prayer to heavenly intercessors, penitential processions, and charity were proclaimed and mandated by the Church. All methods are represented in the paintings, for the role of art was to remind viewers of these remedies. The exhibition includes many of the greatest artists of the period, including Tintoretto, Canaletto, Mignard, Regnier, Sweerts, and Van Dyck. In our more secular world, science plays a major role in coping with plagues such as AIDS, Ebola, and SARS. Still, art continues to inspire and give perspective to the human condition in times of disaster. With Hope and Healing, we can enjoy a wide range of Baroque masterpieces, profound works that will captivate the viewer and provoke discussion of the role of art during times of crisis. A Pale Horse Kinsmen held aloof, brother
was forsaken by brother, oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and
scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own
children to their fate, untended, unvisited as if they had been strangers. While skeptics question whether “The Plague” was really plague, the historic impact of so much death is not in doubt. Our forebears did not understand the microbial aspects of plague, but they knew and feared the resulting ubiquity of death, devastation and desolation. Three often and well-described plagues are the Justinian Plague (540 A.D.), the Black Death (1346-1361), and the Great Plague of London (1665). Death tolls from each are almost incomprehensible. Following established trade routes, these epidemics ravaged humanity at a time when surviving childhood was almost a miracle and the average lifespan was short. The resulting mortality dampened economic and demographic growth for generations. Procopius, celebrated historian and chief archivist to Justinian, recorded the dimensions of suffering and death caused by the 540 A.D. pandemic. In the midst of savage imperial wars, the plague demolished once invincible Roman armies, killing generals and soldiers faster than battle. Entire villages and towns disappeared, crops lay unharvested, famine ensued, law and order broke down, and society failed. Any hopes of reestablishing the Roman Empire were lost. Justinian moved to Constantinople, where he discovered plague mortality was approaching 5,000 a day and where it would eventually reach 10,000 deaths daily. Earth was scorched, contemporaries said, by the dreaded Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, described in the Book of Revelation 6:8, “And I looked, and behold, a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death.” Learned physicians were useless. People turned for consolation and solace to the teachings of Christianity, where monks attended the needs of both body and soul. Disease was equated with vice and sin, and the medical profession, humbled by its inability to control the plague, regressed into a period of intellectual dormancy. The European Black Death is often traced to the summer of 1347, when Genoese merchants, decimated by plague, set sail for home from the city of Kaffa, located on the Black Sea. The disease spread rapidly across the continent, killing perhaps half the population. Very few afflicted lived beyond ten days and mortality rate was 90 percent. Towns in north Italy were the first to institute public health measures, and chief among them was quarantine. The forty-day period (from the Italian “quarentina”), based on the number of days that Jesus was said to have spent in the wilderness, was somewhat effective. Human travel was constrained, but rats continued to come and go, especially from embargoed ships. Across Europe, people slept on straw, roofs were thatched, floors were dirt, and animals were housed indoors. Rats and fleas (vectors of plague) were commonplace and therefore plague spread rapidly. As in the Justinian plague, frightened Christians turned to religion. Some joined Brothers of the Cross, flagellants who traveled from town to town in processions, scourging themselves and anyone else – women, lepers, and especially Jews - thought to cause God’s vengeance. Others erected beautiful shrines, established new religious orders, and venerated the new plague saints (St. Roche and St. Sebastian) who set examples of charity to victims. The Roman Church did not escape the Black Death unscathed. As people began to question their faith, they looked to emerging science in the medieval universities for answers, laying the foundation for both the Reformation and the Renaissance. The nascent publishing industry expanded as early medical self-help books, called ‘”plague tracts,” became a popular form of literature. Magna mortalis (The Great Dying) stimulated moral treatises and papal proclamations as well as poetry and works of fiction. As the plague’s widespread devastation and death disrupted the civic and economic fabrics of Europe, it caused (in England especially) peasant revolts, a serious shortage of workers, and a default redistribution of wealth. Slowly but inexorably, the feudal system started to disintegrate. England continued to suffer successive waves of bubonic plague. In April 1665, London reported a few cases of plague. By May, the epidemic was obvious, and in August, the register of the single parish of St. Giles Cripplegate listed 101 pages of plague deaths. Many of the victims were employed in the cloth-making industry, which was especially susceptible to fleas transported in the wool. Londoners believed fire the best way to eliminate plague. On September 2, the Mayor of London decreed that fires be lit by every sixth house to “purge, correct and amend the rottenness and corruption of the air.” It was not just the corruption of the air, “pestilential miasma,” the English feared. The Puritans were also sure the debauchery of the court of Charles II encouraged divine retribution to the sinful city. In addition, preachers of hellfire and damnation, heeding the prophecies of doom surrounding the number 666 described in the biblical book of Revelation, had long heralded 1666 as the year when God’s punishment would be meted out. The plague continued, although somewhat abated, through the summer of 1666. Then, in September 1666, the Great Fire of London obliterated every trace of the medieval city, and the plague was gone. It was often claimed that the Great Fire eliminated the infection because it not only destroyed the city but also cauterized the ground. It is true that plague never again threatened London. It is also true that plague disappeared from almost every other European city about the same time. There are as many explanations for the end of the western European epidemics as there are historians – a change in trade routes, improvements in hygiene, displacement of the black rat by the brown rat, and plague strains too virulent to survive (a microbe that kills its host too quickly cannot reproduce). These historic episodes of the plague were mysterious and uncontrollable tragedies. Plague destroyed life, undermined families, friends, business, property, governments and nations. It exposed humanity’s unimaginable cruelty and incredible charity. It is also true that these calamities, which caused so much fear and dislocation, became turning points in Western civilization.
Art Responds to the Plague: Depicting Symptomatology, Identifying Remedies From the mid fourteenth to the early eighteenth century, the populations of Western Europe lived through wave after wave of bubonic plague epidemic. For these nearly four centuries, The Plague (or what they at times inaccurately called plague) struck so often and in so many localities that when the inhabitants of any given town or city were not actually living through an active outbreak of the disease, they were anxiously awaiting and preparing for its certain return, knowing that there was little they could do to protect themselves. For these populations, it was an unrelenting, nightmarish experience of impending doom and collective helplessness in the shadow of an unseen yet seemingly omnipresent biological enemy. The new exhibition opening April 3, 2005 at the Worcester Art Museum, Hope and Healing, takes as its central theme the response of the visual arts to this omnipresent fact of everyday European life — bubonic plague — focusing on Italy during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In this period, Italy, with its busy international ports of trade and other centers of commerce with the East, fell victim to this scourge with an extraordinary and devastating frequency matched by few regions of Western Europe. Not surprisingly, we find in fact that the plague, explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly, partially or entirely, informed and influenced a massive number of works of art produced in Italy over the course of these years. Recognizing a plague painting as such – that is, as depicting or referring to that disease – is not necessarily an easy task for twenty-first-century audiences. The pre-modern dictates of decorum and decency in art often prohibited painters from offering medically accurate, repulsively explicit representation of the disease in all of its gruesome symptoms. Hence, artists found it necessary to devise other, more subtle visual means by which to alert the viewers to the presence of plague in the scene before them. As far as plague symptomatology in art is concerned, the most characteristic and most easily identifiable visual cues are, of course, the buboes, the swollen lymph glands, located either in the groin, neck, or armpits of the victims. Again, in early modern art, decorum dictated that buboes be depicted only in attenuated, visually non-shocking form, that is, as a small, almost innocuous raised mass or simple wound, only slightly reddened, with no traces of pus or the other features of true buboes. The same prevailing sense of artistic decency mandated that groin buboes be shown instead on the upper thigh, though it did not prevent artists altogether from showing buboes or any other disturbingly explicit plague symptoms. Artists were usually obliged to resort to a more discrete visual allusion to the buboes, one that was readily understood by their contemporaries, namely, the raised arms of plague victims displaying their (unseen) buboes to onlookers. Plague scenes in art will also invariably show one or more of the figures holding their noses closed with their fingers in an attempt to protect themselves from the horrible stench emanating from the pus-filled bodies of the dead and the dying. Another of the signs of the plague is the darkening of the body of the victim, a condition that we now know to be caused by widespread subcutaneous hemorrhaging brought on by the infection. Of the several other medical manifestations of plague infection – exceedingly high fever, skin rash, delirium, great thirst, headache, vomiting, and utter prostration – only the last sign, the extreme lassitude brought upon its victims, is generally rendered explicit in art. However, in the absence of actual plague victims within a scene, there are other, non-medical cues alerting the viewer either to the presence of plague within a canvas or to the relevance, direct or indirect, of that disease to the painting in question. These signs include arrows, swords, and lances (all symbols of divine wrath being vented through plague); dark clouds (a reference to the "miasma" corrupt-air theory of plague etiology); astronomical or astrological signs and symbols (stars and planets were considered either causes of the plague or omens of its imminent arrival); and an angel holding a flagellum or scourge, symbol par excellence of the plague. Finally, there are, of course, the many plague saints – like Michael the Archangel, Sebastian and Rocco – heavenly intercessors and protectors against the contagion to also serve as visual clues of the connection between a specific canvas and the plague. Unlike the chroniclers (medical or otherwise) of the period, early modern painters did not primarily seek to document the gruesome effects of the contagion, its horror and destruction. Such an “exposé” was deemed alien to the nature and purposes of what we now call “fine art.” Rather, during these times of social crisis, the role of plague-related art – whether commissioned by confraternities, communes, or private citizens – was, above all, to be an instrument of healing and encouragement, a mirror and a channel of society’s search for solace and cure from the heavens; that is, a supplication to God and the saints. While inevitably reflecting society’s anxieties and sufferings in the face of the unconquerable scourge, art served to remind the viewer of the necessity, availability, and efficacy of the various “celestial cures” at their disposal, thus offering comfort and hope in times of despair. What pre-modern Europeans identified as effective "remedies" for plague fall into two categories: There are, on the one hand, the so-called “temporal" or "human" remedies, medical-social-political measures taken to contain the epidemic (such as quarantine and fumigation of infected areas) and, on the other, the “spiritual remedies,” those enunciated and mandated by the Church. Among the latter approaches were special prayer to Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other heavenly intercessors and protectors against plague; confession and public penitential processions; fasting; almsgiving and other acts of charity (the traditional “corporal works of mercy”); and prayerful meditation upon the inevitability and omnipresence of death and the vanity of this world as well as upon reward and punishments in the next life. All of these spiritual remedies we find depicted or alluded to in many of the plague-related images produced in the period for, again, such was the role of art in time of plague, to remind viewers of these efficacious ecclesiastical remedies at their disposal. Both in Europe and elsewhere, previous research into the plague, we might point out, has been largely epidemiological or sociological in nature, focused primarily on the first category of response, the “temporal remedies,” and on the political-economic consequences of the pandemics. This has been the case despite the fact that there was virtual unanimous agreement among early modern Europeans that the only really effective remedies were spiritual, not medical or otherwise “temporal.” Most everyone in early modern Europe, scientist and layperson alike, acknowledged that the ultimate, the “real” cause of the plague, its Aristotelian “causa finalis,” was to be found not on the natural or physical plane, but rather on the spiritual. It was a response of God himself to the wickedness of a sinful humanity. So great is God’s wrath and so fierce is his response that plague was also often referred to a "divine war" against humanity. A wrathful God was, above all, to be placated, and through the beauty of fine art, a suffering humanity sought to make peace with its creator. AIDS: A
Twentieth Century Plague For year after blurred year, Theresa had ignored her health and avoided doctors. When compelled by this acute illness or that dire circumstance, she would seek medical attention at one urgent care center or another, but she was a single mother with scant resources and her first priority was the well-being of her three children.
At her family’s insistence, Theresa did finally visit a primary care physician for her first comprehensive evaluation in ten years. Her only complaint was omnipresent fatigue; her past medical history included hepatitis B, genital herpes, recurrent vaginal candidiasis, and an abnormal PAP smear. She vehemently denied risk factors for infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), but she did agree to be tested.
Two weeks after her initial visit, Theresa returned with her sixteen-year-old daughter and was told that she was HIV infected. Theresa then relayed that she and her three children had been abandoned by her husband and that in order to care for her family, she had followed in the grim footsteps of a sister-in-law, becoming a commercial sex worker. Ironically, her HIV diagnosis removed the barrier to medical insurance and paved the way for the most effective therapies available; however, Theresa had advanced disease and died of complications of AIDS just two years later.
HIV has infected 65 million people worldwide and the AIDS epidemic, increasing compared to the dreaded Black Death of the 1300’s, has taken the lives of about 25 million people. An estimated 40 million people are living with the virus. It is remarkable, indeed, that 700 years after the Black Death erased entire populations, and in spite of innumerable scientific advances, the world remains in the grip of a pandemic that could cause 65 million deaths.
The astonishing scope and disheartening mortality of AIDS appear similar to those of the Bubonic Plague. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death spread quickly from China to England, killing upwards of 25 million people in Europe over four years. Historians estimate that one-third of the population of Europe died in that terrible epidemic. In stark and sobering similarity, a third of the citizens in some sub-Saharan Africa countries are infected with HIV, raising the spectra that entire countries are doomed to be depopulated.
Physicians in the Middle Ages did not know what caused the Black Death or how the disease was spread. What they did know, however, was that the mortality rate approached 100%. Consequently, people wanted to stay as far away as possible from individuals suffering from the plague. There was perhaps even more societal chaos stirred by the plague than there has been by AIDS. Even during the “AIDS scare” of the nineteen eighties, it was known that the virus was spread primarily through blood and semen.
Perhaps what makes HIV/AIDS different and more socially traumatic for the sufferer than was the plague is that the contemporary affliction can marginalize an already alienated group. When HIV/AIDS first reached the media, the infection was regarded as a disease of homosexual males, “the gay cancer.” Herein lies one of the greatest distinctions between our society’s treatment of HIV/AIDS and the Middle Ages society’s treatment of the plague: Whereas Europeans loathed the disease, elements of our society loathe the people who suffer from it. Some people blame the victims who contract AIDS, believing the illness to be the natural consequence of irresponsible behavior. HIV/AIDS disease can isolate patients from family and friends. Of course, if the plague had produced chronically infected and persistently infectious patients, one can only imagine how such unfortunate souls would have been treated by an ignorant, frightened, and not infrequently barbaric citizenry.
As was the case with the plague, some see AIDS as a manifestation of God’s wrath. An article published in The Good News: A Magazine of Understanding states:
“The Black Death was a disease of filth. If people had followed simple biblical laws of hygiene, many could have avoided infection and death…Today’s plague, AIDS, is also a disease of filth – the filth of the mind that dominates contemporary culture and leads to rampant sexual immorality.”
What works best in medicine are the scientifically grounded fundamentals: vigilance and surveillance, early and prompt therapy, prophylactic and public health interventions, and comprehensive, collaborative and compassionate patient care. A concerted effort must be made by all international health agencies and governments to implement prevention programs based on education, behavioral modification, and the empathetic treatment of those infected with HIV.
A Modern Understanding of the Plague of Fourteenth Century Europe Recent estimates suggest that the population of Western Europe may have dropped by as much as 60-70% between 1348 and 1420. This occurred in the face of, although probably not entirely due to, an outbreak of bubonic plague that is thought to have been imported from Asia by sailors entering Sicily in October, 1347. The first epidemic (1348-1349) was marked by the presence of victims whose signs and symptoms (including the development of buboes in the armpits and groin) fit with our modern understanding of bubonic plague. There is considerable controversy, however, as to whether some of the subsequent waves of epidemics that spread across Europe over the next few centuries (from the fourteenth to the eighteenth) were truly caused by Yersinia pestis (the cause of plague) or might have been cholera, anthrax, or smallpox. Regardless of the exact causes (and it seems entirely possible that Europe in the Middle Ages was the scene of several different epidemics that could have included influenza and smallpox in addition to bacterial diseases), the cause of the precipitous drop in population is probably the result of a combination of the deaths that were a direct consequence of the microbes (which may have been half of the problem) and of the devastating effect that these epidemics had on society, the latter of which probably led to a decrease in fertility based on cultural changes occurring as a reaction to the microbial invasions. Yersinia pestis is a gram negative bacillus that is thought to be a “young pathogen,” perhaps having evolved from Yersinia pseudotuberculosis within the last 20,000 years. Historical records indicate that there were three major epidemics of Yersinia pestis, the first in the sixth century and affecting most of the Roman Empire, the second one the pandemic of the 14th century, the Black Death, thought to have spread from Asia in 1347, and finally the third pandemic that appeared in the mid-19th century and is still with us today. Despite claims of identification of plague DNA from dental pulp of likely victims of the first plagues with subsequent identification of specific biovars by one group, there is still controversy as to whether the Black Death was really plague. Plague is found today, and undoubtedly was in the past as well, in rodents. In the United States, cases are common in the Southwest where plague is enzootic in prairie dogs and can spread to domestic dogs and cats. It is thought that most plague in the U.S. is carried by fleas in accordance with our usual understanding that the spread of bubonic plague is from rodents (often rats in Europe) to fleas to man. There has been much debate as to whether or not the epidemics that spread across Europe in the 14-18th centuries were indeed plague, the discussions fueled by two irregularities; the mass rodent death that should have preceded the plague’s progression to humans was not in evidence, and the prominent role of the flea was not recorded in the descriptions of the disease. Mass deaths of rats were reported in epidemics of plague that occurred in China at the turn of the century but were not noted in all the epidemics seen in Europe. It is of some interest that in a recent review of contemporary cases in the U.S., in only one case was a history of a flea bite obtained (in 27 cases), making one question whether it would have been obvious to medieval observers that this was a flea-spread disease. Plague can also be rapidly transmitted in its pneumonic form from human to human without the presence of fleas. In these cases, which are characterized not only by high fevers, chest pain, and diarrhea, but also by “coughing with foamed and bloody sputum,” the disease is spread by aerosol and assumedly by factors said to favor pneumonic plague, including confinement of people in poorly ventilated houses. The other major historical controversy about the plague is marked by a discussion of the meaning of “di segno,” the “sign” that was associated with death from the plague in Italy. Many scholars have translated “di segno” to suggest a specific rash that was associated with fatal cases. While plague is characterized by bubos and also may be characterized by hemorrhages in the forms that we have documented in the 20th century, it is not characterized by rashes, which are more characteristic of typhoid, typhus, or smallpox, all of which were epidemic diseases with high mortalities. Regardless of the explanation of “di segno,” it does seems probable: 1) that Y pestis did migrate from Asia in the 14th century and 2) that Y pestis was likely only one of many infections associated with high mortalities that occurred in epidemics and might have spread terror in medieval Europe.
A Shared
Relationship Between AIDS and Plague Most people would be upset to learn that one of their genes is malformed. But what if the “mistake” were beneficial to them? A mutation of the human CCR5 gene, called "delta 32," has no adverse effect on humans and could actually save your life. A PBS documentary about Black Death quoted Dr. Stephen J. O'Brien of the National Institutes of Health in Washington D.C. as saying, "It's highly unusual, most genes, if you knock them out, cause serious diseases like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia or diabetes. But CCR5-delta32 is rather innocuous to its carriers. The reason seems to be that the normal function of CCR5 is redundant in our genes; that several other genes can perform the same function." This news may not seem exciting, but delta 32 is indeed a powerful “mistake.” HIV attacks the human immune system, infecting the white blood cells sent to destroy; the delta 32 mutation blocks entrance into the cell. There are documented cases of partners of patients who died from AIDS where the CCR5 mutation prevented them from contracting the virus and meeting the same fate. In order to have total resistance to HIV, an individual must carry two doses of the mutated gene, one from each parent. If he or she gets only one dose, the individual may have partial resistance and the onset of HIV might only be delayed once he or she is infected. O'Brien's work on AIDS led him to another disease that delta 32 could prevent, the plague. "They both, upon entering the body, infect the microphages, which are the first line of defense against bacterial infections. Over the course of evolution, many bugs and pathogens have become extinct because the body learned how to defend itself against them. So the ones that are around today, like HIV and the plague, are pretty savvy -- HIV, for example, specifically attacks and kills the very cells that are designed to kill it." In September 1665, the English village of Eyam had an outbreak of plague and began a self-inflicted isolation from the rest of England. A year later, the first outsiders entered Eyam expecting a ghost town but instead finding that half the town had survived. Dr. O'Brien suggests that the survivors were immune. He tested the DNA of their modern-day descendents and found delta 32 in 14% of the samples. He next assembled a team to test for delta 32 around the world. "Native Africans did not have delta 32 at all," O'Brien says, "and when we looked at East Asians and Indians, they were also flat zero. The levels of delta 32 in Eyam were only matched in regions of Europe that had been affected by the plague and in America, which was, for the most part, settled by European plague survivors and their descendents.” The results of the study suggest that delta 32 may have helped save Europe from the bubonic plague pandemic. Delta 32 seems to be a formidable defense developed by the human body in response to ages of pathogenic exposure. And though we may just be getting acquainted with it, delta 32 has been protecting humans for ages. "There have been human remains dug up from graves in Scandinavia -- bodies 3,000 and 4,000 years old -- in which they actually found the mutation, through DNA typing.” Source is PBS series Secrets of the Dead, Mystery of the Black Death |