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This episode contains discussions of death by contagious disease. I want to emphasize that the plague

is very treatable today with antibiotics, so there's no need to

panic over this disease. After this advice, if contagious disease is still something you don't want

to hear about, this may be a good episode to skip. Also, I'm not a Chinese or Indian history expert,

so if I get something wrong, please let me know via direct message

so I can correct myself. I want to tell this story right. My apologies in advance as well

for pronouncing some of the words in this episode incorrectly. I did research how to say them,

but I'm sure I won't get them quite right. Thank you. And now on with the episode.

Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved.

Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity,

and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages.

I am one of those people.

My name is Halley, and this is the Morbid Curiosity podcast. In the two previous parts of this episode, we covered what the plague is, the first great plague

pandemic, also known as the plague of Justinian, and the second great plague pandemic, also called the Black Death.

In summary, the plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is spread through flea bites.

It's usually a zoonotic disease of rodents, but under certain conditions it can be passed to humans when the fleas switch hosts.

The two most common forms of the plague

...