Death in Venice: A Digital Reconstruction of a Large Plague Outbreak During 1630-1631

Abstract

The plague, an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, is widely considered to be responsible for the most devastating and deadly pandemics in human history. Starting with the infamous Black Death, plague outbreaks are estimated to have killed around 100 million people over multiple centuries, with local mortality rates as high as 60%. However, detailed pictures of the disease dynamics of these outbreaks centuries ago remain scarce, mainly due to the lack of high-quality historical data in digital form. Here, we present an analysis of the 1630-31 plague outbreak in the city of Venice, using newly collected daily death records. We identify the presence of a two-peak pattern, for which we present two possible explanations based on computational models of disease dynamics. Systematically digitized historical records like the ones presented here promise to enrich our understanding of historical phenomena of enduring importance. This work contributes to the recently renewed interdisciplinary foray into the epidemiological andsocietal impact of pre-modern epidemics.

The Milano Sforza Registers of the Dead: Health Policies in Italian Renaissance

“…The MML (1452-1801) have been established by the Duke of Milan Francesco I Sforza. They constituted the first registration of the demographical data as well as of the causes of death in Italy (for example the first records of Venice obituaries date back to 1504 (Lazzari et al 2020) and in Europe based on the daily recording of the dead and detailed information about the social ties of decease people (Alter and Carmichael 1999; Vaglienti 2013). Driven by the aim to earn the consent of the population, worried by recurrent plague epidemics (Cohn and Alfani 2007), Francesco Sforza conceived the Registers of the Death as a tool to check the rate of mortality and morbidity among the population, and to detect suspicious cases of plague or violent death (Vaglienti and Cattaneo 2010).…”

Pestis: The Collective Challenges of Epidemics

“…Since then, the notion of epidemic has contained two central elements of its current content, the permanence of the disease, i.e., its entry into a country or its unusual exacerbation, and simultaneously affecting a significant number of individuals, all living in the same place, by affections with similar symptoms. However, ancient physicians did not associate the idea of spread by contagion with the notion of epidemic, as is often (but not always) the case in modern definitions (Huard & Grmek, 1977;Logie & Turan, 2020;Lazzari et al, 2020). Thus, the etymology of the Greek term «epidemic» has two components: epi «over» and we have given «people», something that collapses «over» the «individuals», something that occurs in a given place, something that circulates among the «individuals» of a given place, region or country.…”