Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville offers a reassessment of the impact of plague in the early modern era, presenting sixteenth-century Seville as a case study of how municipal officials and residents worked together to create a public health response that protected both individual and communal interests. Similar studies of plague during this period either dramatize the tragic consequences of the epidemic or concentrate on the tough "modern" public health interventions, such as quarantine, surveillance and isolation, and the laxness or strictness of their enforcement. Arguing for a redefinition of "public health" in the early modern era, this study chronicles a more restrained, humane, and balanced response to outbreaks in 1582 and 1599-1600 Seville, showing that city officials aimed to protect the population but also maintain trade and commerce in order to prevent economic disruption. Based on extensive primary sources held in the municipal archive of Seville, the work argues that a careful reading of the records shows a critical difference between how plague regulations were written and how they were enforced, a difference that reflects an unacknowledged process of negotiation aimed at preserving balance within the community. The book makes important contributions to the study of early modern city governance and to the historiography of epidemics more broadly. Kristy Wilson Bowers received her PhD from Indiana University and teaches in the History Department at Northern Illinois University.

In the first half of the 1580s, Seville, Spain, confronted a series of potentially devastating crises. In three years, the city faced a brush with deadly contagion, including the plague; the billeting of troops in preparation for Philip II's invasion of Portugal; crop failure and famine following drought and locust infestation; an aborted uprising of the Moriscos (Christian converts from Islam); bankruptcy of the municipal government; the threat of pollution and contaminated water; and the disruption of commerce with the Indies. While each of these problems would be formidable on its own, when taken together, the crises threatened Seville's social and economic order. In The Plague Files, Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook reconstruct daily life during this period in sixteenth-century Seville, exposing the difficult lives of ordinary men, women, and children and shedding light on the challenges municipal officials faced as they attempted to find solutions to the public health emergencies that threatened the city's residents. Filling several gaps in the historiography of early modern Spain, this volume offers a history of not only Seville's city government but also the medical profession in Andalusia, from practitioner nurses and barber surgeons (who were often the first to encounter symptoms of plague) to well-trained university physicians. All levels of society enter the picture—from slaves to the local aristocracy. Drawing on detailed records of city council deliberations, private and public correspondence, reports from physicians and apothecaries, and other primary sources, Cook and Cook recount Seville's story in the words of the people who lived it—the city's governor, the female innkeepers charged with reporting who recently died in their establishments, the physicians who describe the plague victims' symptoms. As Cook and Cook's detailed history makes clear, in spite of numerous emergencies, Seville's bureaucracy functioned with relative normality, providing basic services necessary for the survival of its citizens. Their account of the travails of 1580s Seville provides an indispensable resource for those studying early modern Spain.

This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies, and travelers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.

Plague in the Early Modern World presents a broad range of primary source materials from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, China, India, and North America that explore the nature and impact of plague and disease in the early modern world. During the early modern period frequent and recurring outbreaks of plague and other epidemics around the world helped to define local identities and they simultaneously forged and subverted social structures, recalibrated demographic patterns, dictated political agendas, and drew upon and tested religious and scientific worldviews. By gathering texts from diverse and often obscure publications and from areas of the globe not commonly studied, Plague in the Early Modern World provides new information and a unique platform for exploring early modern world history from local and global perspectives and examining how early modern people understood and responded to plague at times of distress and normalcy. Including source materials such as memoirs and autobiographies, letters, histories, and literature, as well as demographic statistics, legislation, medical treatises and popular remedies, religious writings, material culture, and the visual arts, the volume will be of great use to students and general readers interested in early modern history and the history of disease.

A vibrant city-state on the Adriatic sea, Dubrovnik, also known as Ragusa, was a hub for the international trade between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the city suffered frequent outbreaks of plague. Through a comprehensive analysis of these epidemics in Dubrovnik, Expelling the Plague explores the increasingly sophisticated plague control regulations that were adopted by the city and implemented by its health officials. In 1377, Dubrovnik became the first city in the world to develop and implement quarantine legislation, and in 1390 it established the earliest recorded permanent Health Office. The city’s preoccupation with plague control and the powers granted to its Health Office led to a rich archival record chronicling the city’s experience of plague, its attempts to safeguard public health, and the social effects of its practices of quarantine, prosecution, and punishment. These sources form the foundation of the authors' analysis, in particular the manuscript Libro deli Signori Chazamorbi, 1500-30, a rare health record of the 1526-27 calamitous plague epidemic. Teeming with real people across the spectrum, including gravediggers, laundresses, and plague survivors, it contains the testimonies collected during trial proceedings conducted by health officials against violators of public health regulations. Outlining the contributions of Dubrovnik in conceiving and establishing early public health measures in Europe, Expelling the Plague reveals how health concerns of the past greatly resemble contemporary anxieties about battling epidemics such as SARS, avian flu, and the Ebola virus.

Bridging the gap between histories of medicine and political/institutional histories of the early modern crown, this book explores the relationship between one of the most highly bureaucratic regimes in early modern Europe, Spain, and crown interest in and regulation of medical practices. Complementing recent histories that have emphasized the interdependent nature of governance between the crown and municipalities in sixteenth-century Spain, this study argues that medical policies were the result of negotiation and cooperation among the crown, the towns, and medical practitioners. During the reign of Philip II (1556-1598), the crown provided unique opportunities for advancements in the medical field among practitioners and support for the creation and dissemination of innovative medical techniques. In addition, crown support for and regulation of medicine served as an important bureaucratic tool in the crown's effort to expand and solidify its authority over the distinct kingdoms and territories under Castilian authority and the municipalities within the kingdom of Castile itself. The crown was not the only agent of change in the medical world, however. Medical policies and their successful implementation required consensus and cooperation among competing political authorities. Bringing to life a cast of characters from early modern Spain, from the female empiric who practiced bonesetting and surgery to the university-trained, Latin physician whose medical textbook standardized medical education in the universities, the book will broaden the scope of medical history to include not only the development of medical theory and innovative practice, but also address the complex tensions between various authorities which influenced the development and nature of medical practice and perceptions of 'public health' in early modern Europe. Juxtaposing the history of medicine with the history of early modern state-building brings a unique perspective to this challenging book that reassesses the relationship between the monarch and intellectual milieu of medicine in Spain. It further challenges the dominance of studies of medical regulation from France and England and illuminates a diverse and innovative world of Spanish medical practice that has been neglected in standard histories of early modern medicine.

This study of the Black Death considers the nature of the disease, its origin, spread, mortality and its impact on history.