Given its devastating impact on Europe some people have assumed that the Black Death was so virulent that it killed without regards to victims’ health. By looking at hundreds of skeletons, researchers with a taste for the macabre have disproved this supposition.

“A lot of people have assumed that the Black Death killed indiscriminately, just because it had such massive mortality,” Sharon DeWitte, a paleo-pathologist at University at Albany in New York, told Reuters.

For a new paper in PNAS, DeWitte and her colleagues analysed 490 skeletons from victims of the 1349 London outbreak of plague, called Black Death as it caused unsightly black patches on the skin. They looked for lesions on bones (which can be caused by malnutrition) in these remains and also in a control sample of bones from non-epidemic cemeteries from Denmark.

Although in the Danish bodies the link between lesions and death was far stronger, it was also present to some degree in the London remains. Basically, if you were well fed and healthy, your chances of surviving were better.

“Some contemporary reports of the Black Death state that everyone was at equal risk. But we have quantitative evidence that not everyone was at the same risk,” DeWitte told The Daily Telegraph.

The paper does add an almighty caveat: “It is important to note that the estimated differences between the two samples may reflect the use of an inappropriate comparison sample rather than actual differences in the strength of selectivity in normal verses Black Death mortality.”

Leaving this aside, finding that a virulent disease killed the weak better than it killed the strong may not be a radical finding. But the NY Times points out that the Spanish flu of the 1918 epidemic killed healthy people while leaving behind children and the elderly “whose weaker immune systems did not overreact to the infection”. It also notes that HIV and other STIs impact more on the strongest and healthiest as they send to have more sex.

Nature’s Matt Brown recently slept in a plague pit, for no good reason at all. You can read about that here.

Image: skull of an adult female Black Death victim / courtesy of Jelena Bekvalac and Tania Kausmally, Museum of London