Plague Hospitals: Public Health for the City in Early Modern Venice

Abstract

In this carefully researched and engaging study, Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw offers a focused and multifaceted history of Venice's two iconic lazaretti, or plague hospitals: formidable castle-like structures occupying their own islands in the Venetian lagoon. Contributing to a growing revisionist scholarship on medical institutions, Crawshaw balances traditional medical aspects of diagnosis and cure with civic, religious, and economic concerns in order to understand Venetian lazaretti in their specific local contexts. While the study is focused on Venice and its peninsular lands (with only a few comments on plague and its management in Venice's Adriatic and Ionian colonies), Crawshaw enhances her discussion with comparisons with other plague hospitals in Italy and Western Europe.Plague hospitals emerged throughout Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as specialized institutions designed to separate the suspected "plague sick" from the uninfected in order to prevent the spread of the disease, to attempt to heal the sick, or else to serve as places where the sick could die and be buried at arm's length from the healthy. They were also depots that quarantined goods, merchants, and travellers coming from suspected plague-ridden places. Crawshaw's work differs from that of a previous generation of historians who, approaching these institutions through a Foucauldian lens, portrayed hospitals and lazaretti as jails, institutions of social repression where the state forcibly locked away the sick-usually the urban poor-and kept them out of sight until they died. Crawshaw problematizes these assumptions by carefully examining the day-to-day functioning of Venice's plague hospitals and situating them within the web of La Serenissima's institutional responses to social problems through charity, poor relief, and healthcare. Far from seeing Venetian lazaretti as "antechambers" or "charnel houses" of death, Crawshaw reveals the diverse ways the Venetian state and the administrators and staff of plagues hospitals attempted to intervene positively in the lives of the sick in order to cure them and alleviate their suffering, or else to isolate them and prevent plague from spreading. The aim, Crawshaw contends, was always to promote the physical and economic health of the city and its inhabitants. Approaching the subject

Senses of Space in the Early Modern World

“…Large dormitory warehouses outside their portsand in the case of Venice, two islands set apart in the lagoon in 1423 and 1468were the obligatory enclosures greeting merchants and sailors on any ship arriving from a place suspected of having plague. Plague doctors in some cities wore early modern airtight hazmat suits with long black robes, gloves, wide brimmed hats, and facemasks with glass eyepieces and long noses stuffed with mixtures of cleansing spices, herbs, and flowers like ambergris, cloves, mint, myrrh, lavender, or roses to purify the contaminated air they had to breathe (Stevens Crawshaw 2016;Glatter and Finkelman 2021).…”

Myśliciel w zadżumionym mieście

“…Istnieje dość rozpowszechniony mit, że nowe formy władzy, nazywane przez Michela Foucaulta władzą dyscyplinarną i biowładzą, pojawiły się dopiero między końcówką XVII i początkiem XIX w. Foucault jednak wyraźnie podkreślał, iż "wielki sen polityczny" o władzy przenikającej do najmniejszych drobiazgów życia inspirowany był wybuchami epidemii czarnej śmierci już w połowie XIV w. (Foucault, 2003). Dyskurs zdrowotny pojawiał się zarówno w średniowiecznych środowiskach monastycznych (Montford, 2004), jak i miejskich (Kinzelbach, 2006;Crawshaw, 2012). Był on także istotny dla określenia warunków organizacji życia armii.…”

The Medieval and Early Modern Hospital. A Physical and Symbolic Space

“…City-states only gradually established policies of isolating plague victims in separate plague hospitals or lazaretti (Stevens-Crawshaw 2012). The process that saw the birth of the lazaretto, however, cannot be isolated from other institutions caring for the sick poor, above all existing medical hospitals.…”