Invincible urban management

59. Drought and Black Death

ps: To celebrate the strong push of the category, double updates will start in the early hours of tomorrow.

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According to the climate in Central America, it should have entered the rainy season starting from May and June every year.

However, in June 1519, a severe drought began to spread throughout Central America—although it had entered the rainy season, the amount of rainfall in various places was pitifully small, and each time the rainfall only moistened the dry ground, it was gone. In the end, it has no effect on alleviating the drought. There are terrible signs of land cracks and seedlings dying of drought everywhere. A large reduction in grain production has become a foregone conclusion.

Fortunately, there are many lakes and rivers around Port of Hope, and there is no shortage of water sources, and water diversion channels have been built, so it is not greatly affected by the drought.However, some outlying villages and towns far away from Port Hope, especially near several logging camps that do not rely on the river, have water sources. The springs have dried up and the streams have stopped flowing. Residents can only use some ponds and depressions as places for water intake. And stagnant water that lacks fluidity is more likely to breed diseases...

For example, at this time, Wang Qiu was standing in a village about five kilometers away from Port Hope, watching a warrior scoop up some water with a gourd ladle—the stream near the village stopped flowing, and only A pile of rotten mud.A large area of ​​crops died due to lack of water, and the villagers could only rely on the rainwater stored in a few reservoirs. After a long time, the water in the ponds became turbid, breeding an unknown number of bacteria and insects.Before the warrior brought the water ladle to him, Wang Qiu smelled a strange smell, so he waved his hand in disgust, motioning him to pour the water out.

In the thatched hut next to the pool, lay a few young people with bulging bellies and sick faces, obviously suffering from parasitic diseases.There were also a few emergency patients who had a high fever and their faces were as red as boiled lobsters. Although they had been given oral penicillin, their condition was still very bad.

"... Sigh, it's a strange thing that you don't get sick if you drink too much of such unclean water!"

Seeing such a miserable scene, Wang Qiu could only sigh helplessly.

For these patients, the level of the local aboriginal witch doctors is too low, basically they only know how to kill live sacrifices and dance to the gods, and they don't even know how to make symptomatic herbs.Travelers who are not medical professionals, there is no good way to do this, but the patients can only be isolated as closely as possible, and the bodies of the dead are burned and buried deeply.Randomly distribute some antibiotics and aspirin tablets to people with high fever, and take some medicines to fight roundworms to people suffering from parasites.

In addition, another more effective countermeasure is to abandon some villages and fields that are so severely short of water that they cannot maintain basic production and living, and relocate villagers to Port Hope, where they can be incorporated into logging teams to work for a living. As for rations, they rely on government subsidies-there is still a lot of food exchanged from various tribes in the warehouse through the dumping of modern industrial products, which is still enough for the time being.

If it is not possible, Wang Qiu can also purchase food in large quantities from the modern world to make up for the food gap: thanks to the development of the chemical fertilizer and pesticide industries and the high-yield seeds cultivated and improved by biotechnology, there is no time and space when it comes to the prices of various major grains. Cheaper than the modern world.

In general, although the disaster near Port Hope is a bit of a headache, it is far from affecting social stability.

However, now that Port of Hope, which has a golden finger plug-in, has been opened, it is so embarrassed in the face of the drought.For other Indian tribes and city-states that have no trump card, it is even more catastrophe-the drought cracked the land, and the dry corn was dying under the scorching sun.Even if there is still some food in the family, there is no need to worry about starving to death soon, but the pervasive disease will still take the life of anyone silently.

As a result, starting from the end of June, following the footsteps of some out-of-town traders and migrant workers, a more ferocious plague hit Port Hope.

Although it was not the first time for the travelers in Port Hope to encounter the plague, their illness still shocked them a lot.

"...high fever, hemoptysis, vomiting, diarrhea, and purple-black blood clots under the skin. It usually only takes six or seven days from onset to death...such symptoms...could it be the Black Death brought by the European expedition ?!"

Looking at the increasing number of patients in the port quarantine area, both Wang Qiu and Wen Desi felt their scalps tingling.

Anyone who knows the history of the Middle Ages in Europe knows how terrifying the "Black Death" is.

——In 1348, a Mongolian army attacked a port in the Crimea Peninsula. In order to force the defenders to surrender as soon as possible, the Mongols used trebuchets to throw carrion into the city, which caused a great plague in the city. This is the black death the original origin of the disease.After the city was captured by the Mongolian army, some of the defenders and citizens fled by boat, and as a result, the Black Death spread to the entire Black Sea and the coastal areas of the Mediterranean Sea... One of the obvious symptoms of the Black Death is that the skin surface of the patient Many black spots appeared, so this special plague was called "Black Death".

In that era of backward medical technology and no antibiotics, death was almost an inevitable fate for European patients infected with the disease, and there was almost no possibility of cure.From 1348 to 1350, during the three years when the Black Death first ravaged, a total of 3000 million Europeans died of the Black Death, equivalent to a reduction of one-third of the population of the entire Europe!

Moreover, the epidemic of the Black Death did not stop here. In the following centuries, it happened again and again in various European countries... Until the advent of antibiotics, the nightmare of the Black Death was always hovering over the head of every European .

Now, as Columbus discovered the New World, this nightmare also fell on the Indians together with measles, smallpox, and yellow fever.

As far as Wang Qiu and Wen Desi saw, the plague that recently broke out among the Indians was very similar to the Black Death.But whether it is plague or hemorrhagic fever, it is impossible to judge for the time being - even if the patient's sputum and blood samples are taken to the hospital in the modern world for analysis, it will take at least two days to come and go, multiply by 24 times The time flow rate is almost two months here... By then, the plague will almost be over.

Therefore, the only countermeasure they could make was to treat a dead horse as a living horse doctor and continue to abuse the "panacea" of oral antibiotics. It turned out that the effect of penicillin tablets was not very good. After switching to streptomycin, they finally It's a little better, but people still keep dying.

In the isolation area with poor conditions, those patients and suspected patients are all living in despair.Even though lime was sprinkled everywhere and medicines were plentiful, people died every day blackened all over.Dead bodies were immediately removed and cremated to prevent contagion.

This kind of fear and despair of not knowing when to die, on the one hand, led to the rapid shrinkage of commercial trade, and on the other hand, it caused the extreme deterioration of law and order. Various acts of violence emerged in endlessly, making the warriors responsible for suppressing the situation in the city very busy. Scalp tingling.

At the same time, with the rapid spread of the plague, the diplomatic negotiations with the Aztec envoys could not go on—the leader of the envoy, Kuohtemoc, the future last emperor of the Aztecs, could not continue. Knowing what kind of dirty things he got on while wandering around in the suburbs, unexpectedly, on the fourth night after arriving in Port of Hope, when the "suspected Black Death" just broke out, he and a few of his cronies were the first to take the lead fall down!

In the next few days, this young warrior, who was originally as strong as a cow, quickly lost weight at a speed visible to the naked eye, and in the end almost only a pair of bones remained... When Wang Qiu went to visit When I was there, I found Kuohtemok with red eyes, disheveled hair, spitting out thick phlegm with blood from time to time, his skin was hot enough to cook potatoes, and his appearance was haggard like a ghost.

After all, the future emperor who was born as a soldier has been trained for a long time, has a strong body, and has a good physique. After Wang Qiu, a self-taught Mongolian doctor with two knives, bit the bullet and flipped through the textbooks of the medical school, he randomly opened a bunch of various types. There are no conflicting antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs, and after cooking ginseng soup for tonic according to the experience of martial arts novels, I did not die from the torture, but slowly recovered.

Even so, after such a serious illness, Kuohtmok, who was originally a hunchback, became so weak that he couldn't even stand up.And his entourage was generally very weak due to the long journey before, and a quarter of them died of illness during the plague.