Pestilential complexities

the long version

These essays were originally delivered as papers at a conference held at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine it UCL, in 2006. The aim of the conference was not to settle the question of the identity of the plague, but to bring together many many of the leading experts in the field in order to clarify the crucial issues dividing the supporters of the theory of Yersinia pestis from those advocating a variety of explanations.