Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
Encircled by gold frames, the cuff links hold images that look a bit like watercolor paintings of splashing raindrops. They’re blue—one pale shade and another a little inkier—against a creamy background.
In fact, they’re not watery at all. The shapes are bacilli—rod-shaped bacteria—and the image depicts strains thought to have caused the bubonic plague.The cuff links were fashioned around 1900, and entered the collection of the Science Museum in London in the late 1980s. They drifted in as part of a larger bequest of medals and other objects with a link to medicine, writes Stewart Emmens, curator of community health, in an email. Decades later, the little curios evoke an era of rapid and profound change in the medical realm.
The Black Death, generally considered to have been the bubonic plague, devastated Europe during the Middle Ages. It wiped out millions of people—by some estimates, as much as half of the population. Many sufferers saw their skin pocked with buboes, swollen lymph nodes that looked something like blisters. Sometimes, dying tissues appeared black. Filthy air, nibbling vermin, and bad luck were cast as culprits of the outbreak; at that point, no one thought much about bacteria.
As the 19th century drew to a close, though, plague was back. This time, it was tearing through China and India. And this time around, scientists suspected that bacteria might be to blame.
The 19th century was a fascinating one for the fledgling fields of microbiology and bacteriology. In the early 1800s, most microscopes were luxuries peddled for fun and wonder, writes medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris in The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. English gentlemen snapped up velvet cases stocked with prepared slides, and peered at…
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