HIST 249 Lecture 7: 7
Medieval Medicine 2: Practices,
Practitioners & Plague
• Reading:
o Online e-book chapter: Neil Murphy - Plague Ordinances
and the Management of Infectious Diseases in Northern
French Towns
▪ Hygiene, sanitation & health
▪ A plague industry
▪ Contagion and isolation
▪ Plague & poverty
▪ Conclusion
• Last time - the university
o Human dissection
o Teachers used dissection of the pig in order to give a visual
representation of what it was about
o Teachers - dissection of humans to represent Galenic
medicine
• Human dissection in the school in Italy
o Italy because it is a zone of roman law
o In Roman law - forensic autopsy (is allowed to open up the
body to find evidence of killing etc.)
▪ Charge will depend on if judge can be persuaded
through this forensic evidence
▪ (this is very different than dissection as a role of
teaching --> academic dissection)
o Elite families concerned with heritable disease
▪ Begin to ask the right to open up the dead family
member in order to find if the disease was heritable that
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2
they died from - might impact the family down the line
▪ An extension of forensic autopsy
o Precocious development of city-state governments
▪ Have the right of justice over others
▪ Can put people to death
▪ Issues of disposing their bodies - no one around to
claim the body or offended if the body was disposed
otherwise
▪ Therefore it was given to universities faculties to use for
human dissection
▪ City has a responsibility for the health of its citizens
▪ Its duty in promoting health
o Italian vs. Northern attitudes towards death
▪ Mediterranean world - death was instant, body & soul
was separated, no sense of harm is inflicted on the
person through dissection
▪ Northern - death was prolonged, took a long time for
body & soul to separate
▪ Why ghosts are different for these regions (Med -
invisible, Northern - walk around)
• Domestic autopsy in Italy - family members around the body
• Academic dissection - university professors in their robes
o Formal academic exercise
o Was not controversial - even though the church put limits on
it (give the cadaver a proper christian burial afterwards)
o Academic place - discuss areas of disease
o Designed to be a visual demonstration
o Dissections took place in the winter, open air - due to the
body putrefaction
o Need to have the body @ the right time of year
o Usually was only once a year…
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