History's 10 Most Terrible Plagues

The entire span of human history has been an arms race of survival adaptations against diseases which seem to be out to completely destroy us, both as individual organisms and as a collective species. Every time we come up with a new technique to combat various communicable diseases, the pathogens responsible change and mutate, becoming better-adapted to our weapons against them. Such is the way of all of life. Theorists are even now drawing comparisons to this dynamic to describe crime, wherein criminals adopt new methods of lawbreaking, only to again be outdone by advances in law enforcement.[1]Life is constantly striving to outdo and overcome itself. With this in mind, there have been some pretty brutal plagues which have threatened entire civilizations on many occasions. The term “plague” is used generally here to mean any sort of pathogen which devastated a large portion of a human population, though many of the following entries, in fact, involve the plague you’re thinking of. Here are ten of the most atrocious plagues in human history, what they were, and what happened.