Historiographical Essay about the Black Death

Topics:	Black DeathStudy World History
Words:	525
Page:	1 This essay sample was donated by a student to help the academic community. Papers provided by EduBirdie writers usually outdo students' samples.
Updated:	07.06.2024

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The Black Death started in Asia and quickly spread through to Europe while and after it was spreading/had spread it left many horrible consequences for the both the long and short term but the Black Death also left quite a few good changes in the short and long term specifically in the long term. Three consequences that the Black Death left are in the long term people who lived after the Black Death lived longer and healthier lives, in the short term the cost of labour increased so workers could get better pay and in the long term medicines improved.

One of the long term benefits of the Black Death were people lived longer and had healthier lives. The evidence to support this is a study done dug up the bodies of people who lived before, during and after the Black Death (University of Carolina 2014). This study found that after the Black Death people were more commonly reaching ages like 70-80 years and a showed hardiness towards disease. This also made a huge difference in the genetic makeup of the populace as the people who survived the Black Death usually had a specific gene/s that helped them. Also the study found that people were hardier because the Black Death acted as a force of natural selection weeding out those who were weak and frail and leaving those who were healthy and strong to breed therefore making the populace healthier and helping them to live longer.

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One of the short term benefits of the Black Plague was a decrease in available labourers. The mass death from the Black Death helped peasants and serfs to get better wages and treatment as the lords had to fight for their work (msh.Council.org 2020). The scarcity of available workers lead to increase in wages and better treatment as peasants found that they could chose not to do a job because its dangerous. They could move to another lord for better pay and treatment, the lords that didn’t want to give their workers better quality conditions soon found that other lords were more than happy to take their worker from them and their workers were all to happy to leave them. This all lead to workers being treated better than they were before the Black Death.

One of the long term benefits of the Black Death was how medicine improved with the development of the Black Death. Medicine at the time of the Black Death was all forms considered mostly quackery and religious healing. The Black Death forced medicine to improve and create treatments that actually healed people. There was a study (Wayne State University 2010) where they looked at the future of medicine after the Black Death. This study points out that the Black Death did in fact reveal some very disastrous short comings and how the Black Death prompted physicians of the time to focus more on the practice of medicine. The study also points out that because of the Black Death universities started teaching the anatomy of the human body to their medical students. The Black Death caused the medical community and its practitioners to improve drastically for the better.

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Historiographical Essay about the Black Death. (2024, Jun 07). Edubirdie. Retrieved October 23, 2025, from https://hub.edubirdie.com/examples/historiographical-essay-about-the-black-death/

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