The Plague of Athens and the Immune System

This week’s stories focus on a subject in science history which is indeed topical across the world right now: the discovery of how the human immune system works. And to begin, I am introducing the image of this young girl, named Myrtis by the Greek archaeologists who reconstructed her appearance after excavating a mass grave in the mid-1990s.

Myrtis was a typical name for Ancient Athenian girls from the last decades of the 5th-century BCE, and her body was discovered along with about 240 others, all hurriedly buried there between 430-426 BCE, which corresponds with the infamous Plague of Athens. In this time, perhaps 25% of the inhabitants of this city-state died from an illness that historians still debate. It was described by the Ancient Greek Thucydidies in horrific terms: completely healthy people were suddenly stricken with fever, violent coughing, vomiting, blistering skin, and a sensation of burning heat from within. It was highly infectious, so that caregivers quickly succumbed to the disease. In fact, not even carrion birds stayed by the carcasses for long — these animals either died as well or elected not to consume the contaminated bodies.

However, amidst his writings, Thucydidies made an important observation about one group of people who did not get sick, and here I quote: “[But] those who had recovered from the disease . . . Had now no fear for themselves; for the same man was never attacked twice- never at least fatally”.

Thucydidies himself actually caught the plague, and he made one of the first observations of the human adaptive immune system, which is how a body can learn to recognize previously experienced pathogens to fight off disease. Of course, modern vaccines do this without the suffering of having to go through the illness first.

P.S. the many possible causes of this particular disease include Typhoid, Smallpox, and an Ebola-like virus, but nothing has been proven definitively.