This study is an expansion by AI of 2 records published by Skeptron, a studio in the RISCON family, and of the public-domain source texts listed below. Every sentence in a block quote is word for word either a record's own or a passage of a source text saved with this study, and its source line names which; the rest is AI writing. Skeptron's records are modern summaries of historical episodes written for a platform, not archival documents; they keep some of what the actors wrote and drop the rest, and the paper says which where it matters. The readings through the works named are this study's interpretation. Nothing in this study is advice on medical, public-health or policy decisions.
| Case | Studio | Record |
|---|---|---|
| The Plague at Athens | Skeptron | https://skeptron.risconlabs.com/questions?question=HQ-HC1-ATHENS430-01 |
| Florence 1348 | Skeptron | https://skeptron.risconlabs.com/questions?question=HQ-HC4-FLORENCE1348-01 |
The source texts this study read are saved with it, and the passages it quotes from them stand in them word for word:
| Text | File | Address |
|---|---|---|
| Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book II chapters 47–54 (the plague of Athens), in Richard Crawley's translation | sources/thucydides-2-47-54.md | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7142/pg7142.txt |
| Thucydides, Ἱστορίαι (History of the Peloponnesian War), Book II chapters 47–54 (the plague of Athens), in Greek | sources/thucydides-2-47-54-greek.md | https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/master/data/tlg0003/tlg001/tlg0003.tlg001.perseus-grc2.xml |
| Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (1348–1353), the Introduction to the First Day: the plague of Florence, in J. M. Rigg's translation | sources/boccaccio-decameron-1348.md | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3726/pg3726.txt |
| Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron (1348–1353), Giornata prima, Introduzione: la peste di Firenze, in Italian | sources/boccaccio-decameron-1348-italian.md | https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Decameron/Giornata_prima/Introduzione |
The records were read on 2026-10-06. The texts were fetched on 2026-10-06. This study was written on 2026-10-07.
Bibliography
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Richard Crawley (1874): Book II, chapters 47–54, the plague at Athens.
- Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron: the Introduction to the First Day, on the plague of Florence in 1348.
- Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (1986).
- Charles E. Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (1992).
- Ann G. Carmichael, Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence (1986).
- Samuel K. Cohn Jr., The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (2002).
- Kirsten I. Bos and others, A draft genome of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black Death (2011).
- Manolis J. Papagrigorakis, Christos Yapijakis, Philippos N. Synodinos and Effie Baziotopoulou-Valavani, DNA examination of ancient dental pulp incriminates typhoid fever as a probable cause of the Plague of Athens (2006).
- Beth Shapiro, Andrew Rambaut and M. Thomas P. Gilbert, No proof that typhoid caused the Plague of Athens (a reply to Papagrigorakis et al.) (2006).
- David M. Morens and Robert J. Littman, Epidemiology of the Plague of Athens (1992).
- Marc Lipsitch, Christl A. Donnelly, Christophe Fraser and others, Potential Biases in Estimating Absolute and Relative Case-Fatality Risks during Outbreaks (2015).
- Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (1985).
- Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (2005).