MEDICINE AND PREVENTION OF PLAGUE

Medical writers did not hesitate to give advice on measures to prevent plague. As discussed in the previous chapter, this was on two levels: one was related to the community, the other to the individual and to the private space around a person, whether inside their house or out of doors. Both types of advice drew upon the principle that foul smells and dirt had to be expelled, counteracted or avoided. The belief that foul airs and places were pathological was well integrated into learned medicine and popular belief, and as we have seen in chapter 4 it formed a central part of regimen, medical topography and preventive medicine in general.

The advice on measures with community-wide application differed from that addressed to the individual in that it was concerned with the government or ordering of society, and was sometimes specifically directed at magistrates and others in authority. Medical writers were not telling them anything new, for the latter were often well aware of the perceived association between stinking air, foul places and diseases such as plague. The dramatic, community-wide measures of quarantine, the shutting up of infected houses, the closing of lodging houses, inns and theatres, and the banning of fairs were ordered not by physicians but by governments and local authorities.