History of Medicine #07: Cleanliness is next to Godliness: The Problem of Plague in Early Modern Venice

Description

Early modern Venice was economically wealthy, politically powerful and socially cosmopolitan; one sixteenth-century contemporary described the city as a hotel for the people’s of the world. Like many ports with a high turnover of people and where trade provided the economic ‘lifeblood of the city’, protection against disease was of paramount importance. Introductions against the plague have often been characterised as knee-jerk, reactive, desperate, temporary and ineffective and, as such, have been studied separately from other medical and charitable introductions, famous in Renaissance Italy for their sophistication and scale. This paper illustrates that concerns about the plague were permanent in Venice, because of the magnitude of the problem of the disease, the uniqueness of the city’s environment and the wide-ranging concern for morality and reform in Renaissance states. As such, it adds to our understanding of early modern Italian medical, physical and religious history. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 29 March 2011