Iconic Plague Images Are Often Not What They Seem

Many of the images we associate with the plague actually depict leprosy or smallpox. In fact, there are very few images of the Black Death from the time of the scourge.

A few weeks ago, I reported a story about three cases of the plague in New Mexico. The bacterial illness pops up fairly regularly across the globe and is now easily treatable with antibiotics, if caught in time.

The story ran with an iconic image of the plague from a 15th-century Italian document.

But, as historian swiftly on Twitter, the image doesn't actually depict the plague. The patients shown are suffering from leprosy. So, we took the image down and replaced it with another iconic image of the plague, made about 50 years earlier and published in a Swiss Bible. That one, it turns out, doesn't show the Black Death,