The 17th-C. plague in London: now we know. How DNA (and Daniel Defoe) reveal the killer bacteria’s identity in one of history’s longest cold cases. From the article:

Testing in Germany confirmed the presence of DNA from the Yersinia pestis bacterium – the agent that causes bubonic plague – rather than another pathogen.

Some authors have previously questioned the identity of microbes behind historical outbreaks attributed to plague.

Daniel Defoe’s 18th century account of the catastrophic event in A Journal of the Plague Year described the gruesome fate of Londoners.

“The plague, as I suppose all distempers do, operated in a different manner on differing constitutions; some were immediately overwhelmed with it, and it came to violent fevers, vomitings, insufferable headaches, pains in the back, and so up to ravings and ragings with those pains,” Defoe wrote.