Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1477.

Adviser: Paul H. Freedman.

This dissertation examines late medieval medical ideas about causes, prevention, and cure of the plague through the study of a sample of western European medical treatises. These sources, collectively known as plague tracts, reflect contemporary medical theory and practice. The central question addressed is whether medieval medicine changed after the Black Death, and if so, how this change was manifested.

Successive categorization, comparison, and quantification of professional conceptions and treatments of plague in 152 treatises indicate the following: First, plague tracts served for the instruction of physicians, students, patients, and the community at large. They articulated broad preventive and therapeutic measures, which included careful management of both the humoral six non-naturals as well as numerous simple and compound medicines. Importantly, the tracts demonstrate striking continuity in plague medicine over the course of more than two centuries. Neither prevention nor treatment of plague changed significantly from the first pandemic to the end of the sixteenth century.

Treatment measures combined scholastic humoralism with practical experience, and were often restorative and/or palliative. From a modern vantage point, the use of specific remedies suggests that plague medicine was pharmacologically informed and offered significant symptomatic relief. Opium, in particular, present in multiple composite medicines, was beneficial for a variety of disease complaints; its ubiquity in plague medicine has been under-appreciated by traditional historiography.

Plague writings also bear witness to the existence of sophisticated theories of disease contagion. They promoted rational methods of preventing epidemic spread and contributed to the development of effective public health procedures such as isolation and quarantine, improved private and public hygiene, and control of high-risk behaviors. In offering free advice to the community, plague tracts may further have served a charitable function.

Causal interpretations of plague underwent notable change after the turn of the fifteenth century, revealing the extent to which plague tracts were embedded in their socio-cultural context. Against a background of sixteenth-century religious upheaval, physicians increasingly explained the disease as God's punishment for human failings. Thus, the plague treatises trace at once continuity and change, and substantiate both the cultural construction and the social significance of epidemics.