LECTURE OUTLINE FOR HISTORY 204

                                                                       Prof. Martha Carlin

                                                                         Week 13: Tuesday
 

                                           HEALTH AND ILLNESS, PLAGUE AND FAMINE
 

Major health crises of 14th century: Great Famine (1315-22) and Black Death (1347-49)

Distinctions drawn between:
    medicine (physic) and surgery
    licensed (learned or university-trained) physicians and surgeons, and unlicensed healers (including
        midwives, bone-setters, tooth-pullers, barbers, folk healers, and quacks)

The four humors:
    blood (hot and moist)
    phlegm (cold and moist)
    yellow bile (hot and dry)
    black bile (cold and dry)

Diagnostic aids included:
    pulse
    urine (color, sediment, smell, taste)
    stool
    general appearance (especially of eyes, lips, tongue, hair, skin, etc.)
    other symptoms (swellings, pain, weakness, faintness, blurred vision, hearing problems,
        dizzyness, sweating, etc.)

Astrological influence on health

Remedies for illness included:
    bloodletting
    purging (with emetics and laxatives)
    adjustment to diet and daily regimen
    medicines
    prayer

Hospitals (for poor only):
    General hospitals (often excluded pregnant women)
    Leper hospitals (for confinement and care of lepers)
    Lying-in hospitals (for women in childbed)
    Insane asylums
    Almshouses (for the elderly, invalid, or diabled)
    Orphanages
 

Online readings:

   John de Trokelowe, Annales: Famine of 1315

   Some medieval English medical recipes, 14th-15th century

   L'ornement des Dames: collection of English beauty recipes, 13th century

                                                                                    Thursday:

Some responses to the Black Death:

  Massacres of Jews (who were initially accused of poisoning wells to cause the pestilence)
  Procession of flagellants
  Mass burials (part of the plague cemetery near the Tower of London, excavated in the 1980s) 
  Macabre art  (click here to see part of a late 15th-century painting of the "Dance of Death" from Tallinn, Estonia)

    Some effects of the Black Death in Europe:
    Death of approximately one-third of the population in 1347-49
    Recurring episodes of pestilence until 18th cent.; population in decline or stagnant until 16th cent.
    Rise in real wages and fall in land and food prices (until 16th cent.)
    Changes in farming patterns on large estates, e.g., renting out of demesne, or conversion from
        arable to pastoral farming
    Gradual eradication of serfdom (except in Eastern Europe)
    Development of rural industries (espcially textile production)
    Rise in peasant and artisanal standard of living (until 16th cent.)
    Expansion of ecclesiastical property ownership
    Peasant and artisanal revolts (e.g., French Jacquerie, 1358; Florentine Ciompi Rebellion, 1378;
        and English Peasants' Revolt, 1381)
    Rise of  lay participation in civic and religious leadership
    Attempts to use law or statute to prohibit  rise of wages and luxurious dress or food to non-elites
 

Online readings:

    Marchione di Coppo Stefani, The Florentine Chronicle (1370s-1380s): the plague in Florence, 1348

   The plague, and post-plague labor regulations in England, 1348-51

  Journal of a Bourgeois of Paris, 1405-1449, pp. 131, 155: Death, 1418; Poverty, 1420