Cultures of Plague opens a new chapter in the history of medicine.
Neither the plague nor the ideas it stimulated were static, fixed
in a timeless Galenic vacuum over five centuries, as historians and
scientists commonly assume. As plague evolved in its pathology,
modes of transmission, and the social characteristics of its
victims, so too did medical thinking about plague develop.
This study of plague imprints, from academic medical treatises to
plague poetry, highlights the most feared and devastating epidemic
of the sixteenth-century, one that threatened Italy top to toe from
1575 to 1578 and unleashed an avalanche of plague writing. From
erudite definitions, remote causes, cures and recipes, physicians
now directed their plague writings to the prince and discovered
their most 'valiant remedies' in public health: strict segregation
of the healthy and ill, cleaning streets and latrines, addressing
the long-term causes of plague-poverty. Those outside the medical
profession joined the chorus.
In the heartland of Counter-Reformation Italy, physicians, along
with those outside the profession, questioned the foundations of
Galenic and Renaissance medicine, even the role of God. Assaults on
medieval and Renaissance medicine did not need to await the
Protestant-Paracelsian alliance of seventeenth-century in northern
Europe. Instead, creative forces planted by the pandemic of 1575-8
sowed seeds of doubt and unveiled new concerns and ideas within
that supposedly most conservative form of medical writing, the
plague tract.
Relying on health board statistics and dramatized with eyewitness
descriptions of bizarre happenings, human misery, and suffering,
these writers created the structure for plague classics of the
eighteenth century, and by tracking the contagion's complex and
crooked paths, they anticipated trends of nineteenth-century
epidemiology.
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