Histories of the pox

Abstract

This essay charts key approaches to the history of disease by focusing in particular on how historians of early modern Europe have examined venereal disease, commonly called the pox. In offering a state of the field overview, the essay covers studies of past understandings of the disease, the place of the pox in early modern medical practice, the history of hospitals, literary methods, and newer cultural and realist approaches to the topic. Rather than uphold any one method as more valuable than the next, the essay looks at various historical debates and approaches, as well as the assumptions and questions that underlie them, to chart a path for how the field might develop.