It has been suggested that some outbreaks attributed to plague may not have been plague at all, but ergotism, a fungal disease of grain. Plague didn’t come at all to many cold, dry northern places—Iceland escaped entirely, as did much of Norway, Sweden, and Finland—even though those places had rats. At the same time, plague was associated with miserably wet years almost everywhere it appeared—the very circumstances that would tend to produce ergotism. The one problem with the theory is that the symptoms of ergotism are not much like those of plague. It may be that the word pestilence was used
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