Healthscaping a medieval city: Lucca'sCuria viarumand the future of public health history

Abstract

ABSTRACT:In early fourteenth-century Lucca, one government organ began expanding its activities beyond the maintenance of public works to promoting public hygiene and safety, and in ways that suggest both a concern for and an appreciation of population-level preventative healthcare. Evidence for this shift (which is traceable in and beyond the Italian peninsula) is mostly found in documents of practice such as court and financial records, which augment and complicate the traditional view afforded by urban statutes and medical treatises. The revised if still nebulous picture emerging from this preliminary study challenges a lingering tendency among urban and public health historians to see pre-modern European cities as ignorant andapatheticdemographic black holes.

Integrated Remote Sensing to Assess Disease Control: Evidence from Flat Island Quarantine Station, Mauritius

“…Early ventilation strategies included exact site choice and window placement, which, with added fans and ventilators, aimed to bring an ample supply and circulation of air [40] (pp. [4][5][6]. Thus, when the Mauritius government decided to establish a permanent quarantine station, it chose a completely uninhabited island exposed to oceanic winds, ensuring naturally clean and constantly purified air.…”

“…Few colonial officers dictated regulations on which large numbers of quarantined indentured laborers, mostly from Southeast Asia, had to comply. The result of all these actions can be summarized in the concept of "healthscaping", defined as "the physical, social, legal, administrative and political process of regulating and managing the built and natural environment to promote wellbeing" [4] (p. 396). In this article, we focus on the physical and social processes enacted in the founding and management of the station to consider the gap between the theoretical claim and the practical output realized by British colonizers in promoting public health practices.…”

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“…De nombreuses sources historiques indiquent que plusieurs villes européennes prennent les choses en main, surtout vers la fin des années 1300 et au début des années 1400 (voir par exemple le cas de Lucca en Toscane, décrit avec précision par Geltner [2013]). Des taxes sont collectées pour financer les balayeurs de rues, tandis que les nettoyeurs de latrines ramassent les déchets humains à intervalles réguliers.…”

The Healthscaping Approach: Towards a Global History of Early Public Health

“…The term is used here more broadly than in its original coining by public health professionals Thomas Farley and Deborah Cohen (2005). Yet it nonetheless seeks to extend the original term's notion of consciously striving to create "environments where health can bloom" from the combined perspective of environmental design and human behavior, and informed by culturally specific medical science, natural-philosophy, ethics and piety (Geltner 2013). To speak of "early healthscaping" is thus to proclaim the possibility-indeed, the historical reality-of such efforts in numerous societies operating before or outside the context of Euro-American modernity.…”