The phrase “Jack and Jill” existed earlier in England to indicate a boy and girl as a generic pair. It is so used, for example, in the proverb “Every Jack (shall/must) have his Jill”, to which there are references in two plays by William Shakespeare dating from the 1590s.

The roots of this poem are so dark that they should not be allowed anywhere near children. Jack and Jill are actually France’s Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, who were convicted of treason during the French Revolution, otherwise known as the Reign of Terror, and beheaded.

Appearance and Personality. “Jack and Jill went up that hill, for a supposed pail of water. [..] Jack fell down, broke his crown, ’cause Jill pushed him – but no one caught her!”

Here is an example using the “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme:

• Jack and Jill. Went up the hill. To fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down.
• Jack and Jill. went up the hill. along with Bill. who forgot his pill.
• But Jack fell down. and broke his crown. He yelled “oooh”, “ouch”, and “zown!” Then they went into town.

Nursery rhymes, in general, are the worst things anyone has contributed to the literary world. They almost always contain dark themes such as handicapped-animal mutilation (Three Blind Mice), infanticide (Rock-a-bye Baby) or even a possible murder-suicide (Jack and Jill).

A rosy rash, they allege, was a symptom of the plague, and posies of herbs were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease. Sneezing or coughing was a final fatal symptom, and “all fall down” was exactly what happened.

FitzGerald states emphatically that this rhyme arose from the Great Plague, an outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague that affected London in the year 1665: Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses is all about the Great Plague; the apparent whimsy being a foil for one of London’s most atavistic dreads (thanks to the Black Death).

The second line (“a pocket full of posies”) refers to bunch or bouquet of flowers.

Ring a Ring o Roses, or Ring Around the Rosie, may be about the 1665 Great Plague of London: the “rosie” being the malodorous rash that developed on the skin of bubonic plague sufferers, the stench of which then needed concealing with a “pocket full of posies”.

25 million people

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the 17th century the term “humpty dumpty” referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale. The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that “humpty dumpty” was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person.

The Black Death (also known as the Pestilence, the Great Mortality or the Plague) was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Afro-Eurasia from 1346 to 1353.

Preventive antibiotics are also given to people who don’t yet have the plague, but have come into contact with an animal or person who does. So rest assured, the plague isn’t coming back — at least anytime soon.

The influenza pandemic of 1918–19, also called the Spanish flu, lasted between one and two years. The pandemic occurred in three waves, though not simultaneously around the globe. In the Northern Hemisphere, the first wave originated in the spring of 1918, during World War I.

Bubonic plague appeared in Galveston, Texas, in early June 1920. This outbreak is considered to be part of the third pandemic which started in China in 1894 and moved westwards.

In the summer of 1920, the Bubonic plague arrived on Galveston Island. The infectious disease that had killed large portions of the European population struck fear in residents and challenged scientists in the Texas port city 100 years ago.

The Great Plague of Marseille was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in western Europe. Arriving in Marseille, France in 1720, the disease killed a total of 100,000 people: 50,000 in the city during the next two years and another 50,000 to the north in surrounding provinces and towns.

Plague (Yersinia pestis) 2020 Case Definition.

Health officials, in order to prevent the propagation of the disease, made the decision of placing Chinatown under quarantine, without any notice to the residents – targeting Chinese residents only.

Quarantine was first introduced in 1377 in Dubrovnik on Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast (11), and the first permanent plague hospital (lazaretto) was opened by the Republic of Venice in 1423 on the small island of Santa Maria di Nazareth.

The Great Plague of 1665 was the last and one of the worst of the centuries-long outbreaks, killing 100,000 Londoners in just seven months. All public entertainment was banned and victims were forcibly shut into their homes to prevent the spread of the disease.

430 B.C.: Athens. The earliest recorded pandemic happened during the Peloponnesian War. After the disease passed through Libya, Ethiopia and Egypt, it crossed the Athenian walls as the Spartans laid siege. As much as two-thirds of the population died.

The Black Death was probably the earliest recorded pandemic. It took around four years to make its way along the Silk Road from the Steppes of Central Asia, via Crimea, to the Western most parts of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. In Europe alone it wiped out an estimated one to two thirds of the population.

The 1918 influenza pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history. It was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin. Although there is not universal consensus regarding where the virus originated, it spread worldwide during 1918-1919.

“The end of the pandemic occurred because the virus circulated around the globe, infecting enough people that the world population no longer had enough susceptible people in order for the strain to become a pandemic once again,” says medical historian J.