Medieval Medicine And The Plague

Learn the history of medieval disease and how medical treatments were worse than the disease.

An account of the medical world in eastern Spain in the decades before the Black Death.

Describes the illnesses, plagues, diagnoses, and treatments during the Middle Ages.

This engrossing book provides a comprehensive history of the medical response to the Black Death. John Aberth has translated plague treatises that illustrate the human dimensions of the horrific scourge, including doctors’ personal anecdotes as they desperately struggled to understand a deadly new disease.

This edited collection brings together new research by world-leading historians and anthropologists to examine the interaction between images of plague in different temporal and spatial contexts, and the imagination of the disease from the Middle Ages to today. The chapters in this book illuminate to what extent the image of plague has not simply reflected, but also impacted the way in which the disease is experienced in different historical periods. The book asks what is the contribution of the entanglement between epidemic image and imagination to the persistence of plague as a category of human suffering across so many centuries, in spite of profound shifts in our medical understanding of the disease. What is it that makes plague such a visually charismatic subject? And why is the medical, religious and lay imagination of plague so consistently determined by the visual register? In answering these questions, this volume takes the study of plague images beyond its usual, art-historical framework, so as to examine them and their relation to the imagination of plague from medical, historical, visual anthropological, and postcolonial perspectives.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Essays on the practical aspects of medieval European medicine.

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.