You Don't Have This Disease

This week we discuss the killer plague that left Athens weak during am important war. But what plague was it? We have the answer or at least some great ideas about it. Also you don't have this. We promise.

Presented by: Historical Mystery
Category: Historical Mystery

The Plague of Athens was written about in only one surviving source. It survives as a footnote in the historian Thucydides account of the Peloponnesian War. After contracting and living through the disease, he was well acquainted with it. However, it wasn't taken seriously by historians until they found the bodies.

Most of the one page of the account deals with the symptoms:


 * Internal fever (the inflicted showed no outward signs of fever, but felt to hot to wear clothes and sometime threw themselves in fountains for relief).
 * Coughing
 * Diarrhea
 * Hiccups (maybe)
 * Insomina
 * Thirst

Many theories exist as to the fever, including typhoid, typhus and even an exposure to anthrax. Another theory is that it was actually Ebola. While Ebola had it's first official outbreak in the 1970s, it came out of north Africa, just like Thucydides said of the plague, and both diseases have hiccups as a symptom. Cristina concludes that it was probably more than one disease, but if there was only one, she thinks it was Ebola. Whatever tit really was, it played a major part in Athen's loss in the war.

Takeaway: Sometimes it's many things.

Trivia

 * Patreon skit: A wizard describing spells.