Medieval Medicine
Influence of Christianity and Islam
Influence of communications between Medieval west and the Arabic world
Hierarchy of causes
Rise of university medicine blended with ongoing practices of surgeons, barber-surgeons, itinerant practioners, midwives, magic and superstition
Plague
Influence of Religion
Increasing power of Christianity in the Roman world after its legalization in 313
Islam founded in 7th century
Despite their serious conflicts, shared an opposition to Manicheanism (good and evil forces created and perpetually in conflict vs. perfect world created by one God)
Religion, continued
By 1000, monotheistic religions (Christianity and Islam) were significant influence on what texts were preserved
Galen was acceptable to both because of his suggestion of one creator
Mind-body dualism posed a challenge to the practice of medicine—complementary but also conflicting
Islamic Medicine key preserver of Galen and Hippocrates
Maintained philosophical tradition (medicine and philosophy must be a blend) but also
Anglo-Saxon and Medieval medicine in England
Selected texts preserved and reproduced by monks
Emphasis on practical medicine
Blend of religion and practical medicine
Patron saints of particular illnesses
"belt books" and visual images for diagnosis
Hierarchy of Practitioners
Universities developed from 1200s on in Salerno, Bologna,Montpellier, Padua, etc.
Tiny group
Hierarchy of causes
Illness is punishment for sins or a test of the faithful (see Job, Boccaccio)
Planetary influences
Miasmas in the air from stagnant water, decaying bodies, dung, sick people’s breath, poisons attributed to "outsiders"
See assigned readings on lepers and pox for examples
Practices based on beliefs
If God is cause, acts of contrition, prayer, Masses, processions, fasting, self-flagellation
If other, physicians used astronomy and diagnosis of constitutional and environmental ills
Hot and wet at risk: pregnant women, young and libidinous in steamy cities, etc.
The Black Death
Social, medical, and spiritual contexts and effects
The Black Death 1347-1351
Took place in the High Middle Ages
(circa.1000-1400)
Most famous of all epidemics
Killed approximately 25% of population of Europe
Population of Florence (Boccaccio’s home) dropped nearly 75%
Why was this plague different?
Plague had occurred before, but not for 800 years
For the 300-400 years after the Black Death, repeated regional epidemics
What is "bubonic" plague?
Three major types of plague:
Bubonic – transmitted by fleas
Pneumonic – transmitted by droplets of saliva, etc.
Septicaemic – transmitted by insects; etiology less known
All three caused by Yersinia pestis (y. pestis), a complex series of bacterial strains
Y. pestis lives in digestive tract of fleas (rat fleas but also human fleas)
Humans not preferred meal
Bubonic Plague (Black Death)
Most common type
Transmitted to humans by flea bites
1st symptom pustule (gavocciolo)
Enlargement of lymph nodes follows
Subcutaneous hemorrhage next
Cell necrosis and intoxication of nervous system leads to neurological and psychological disorders
6-day incubation period
Highly lethal (50-60 percent die) but not as toxic as other types
Has not disappeared from the world at all but is unlikely to recur in the US because of public health practices
Images of the Plague
Boccaccio
One of three greatest poets of his time (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio)
Influenced Geoffrey Chaucer (major British writer of the Middle Ages, who in turn influenced Shakespeare)
One of the most popular books of all time
Influenced the development of the novella and later the novel
The Decameron
Frame given by "master narrator) enclosing inner narratives told by characters (like The Canterbury Tales – Chaucer—which it influenced)
10 days, 10 tales per day, 100 stories
Like Canterbury Tales, the relationships among the stories (and tellers) and between the frame (Introduction) and the inner stories
The Decameron (1351)
Some of the work written before the plague
Later, Boccaccio regretted the more erotic parts of the work and shared in a melancholy and ascetic cast to the literature and art of the period following the Plague.
Our focus:
Introduction (one of the most famous descriptions of the Black Death)
One tale that represents a recurrent but not singular emphasis on death and dismemberment in the Decameron
This is one example of how issues of the plague show up in the Decameron despite plague itself not being mentioned after the Introduction.
Day 4 Novel 5 – Lisabetta