Poor bodies and disease (2020)
This chapter discusses the prevailing ideas and responses to the pressing problems that diseased paupers presented to European communities over the long early modern period. It focuses on how medical experts depicted the bodies of the poor within their discussions of contagious disease, and makes the case that continuity offers a more useful framework than change for understanding this issue over the course of the period. The chapter argues that early modern doctors constructed the bodies of the poor as uniquely biohazardous. We have heard the concerns of Venetian authorities about the 'refuse and odor' of the immigrant poor. However, by the last quarter of the sixteenth century he detects a clear shift as plague became a disease 'almost exclusively of the poor'. John Henderson supports this view, while Brian Pullan proclaimed that by 1577 it was 'axiomatic' that plague was primarily a disease of the poor.
...MoreBook David Hitchcock; Julia McClure (2020) The Routledge History of Poverty, c.1450-1800.
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