Hi everyone, this is Ali and Teddy from Cool Facts About Animals. And we're excited to share with you here our longer interview with Professor Monica Green. So on the episode right above this one, we have an episode about rats where we talk about cool facts about rats, how they come up through toilets, some other funny stuff. And we also included some of our interview with Professor Green,

but we couldn't fit it all in that one episode, or it would be too long.

What are some of the most interesting facts that you learned from Professor Green?

That there was this big argument of what caused the who or what caused the black plug,

or a bubonic plug, and also that the buboos could get up to the size of a nut or an egg.

Those are like the bubbles that formed under armpits and stuff. Anyway, it's a really interesting

interview and we're really happy to share it with you but I do have one warning which is it might

be a little bit scary or disturbing so I will leave it up to you to think about

if you feel comfortable learning about some some really deadly diseases and if you feel like

that's okay then have a listen if not then you can listen to our rat episode that comes right

above this and we'll be back soon bye i'm monica green and I'm Monica Green and I trained as a historian of science. I spent my career working in the history of medicine, which those two aren't quite overlapping fields, but sort of kind of.

And I do the history of Europe.

I do the history of the Middle Ages.

And I, for about the last decade and a half, I've been doing the history of infectious diseases with most of my focus on plague.

What is the plague? what were the symptoms first

of all the black death is not a term that anybody used in the middle ages just not at all they called

it the great mortality they called it the great death they called it the pestilence of death it's

really actually quite scary how much the focus

was death. But the epithet black is something that doesn't start being used until after the

Middle Ages is over. But what we do think it was is a massive wave of plague that came into the Black Sea, came into the Mediterranean basin,

and just affected all the societies around that. We understand plague now in a scientific way.

So at the end of the 19th century, there was a really big, huge revolution

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