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Darrera modificació: 2021-01-20
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Steczowicz, Agnieszka, "Paradoxical Diseases in the Late Renaissance: The Cases of Syphilis and Plague", dins: Rousseau, George Sebastian (ed.), Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 269-284.
- Resum
- In their study of plague and syphilis, the authors of The Great Pox argue that the ‘experience of the two diseases jointly altered European medicine'. It is not uncommon for these two diseases to be discussed together, whether in contemporary medical treatises or in studies of Renaissance medicine. Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, a collection of essays spanning the ‘long fifteenth century', which begins with the pan-epidemic of bubonic plague, around 1348, and ends in the 1490s when syphilis first appeared, is a case in point. In the century following the outbreak of the ‘French disease', plague provided a ready-made pattern of interpretation for the more recent epidemic. This is partly due to the popularity of medieval plague tracts, which served as a model for treatises dealing with syphilis.3 But syphilis in turn changed the nature of debates about plague, perhaps as a result of the influential new theories prompted by its emergence. In the late Renaissance, similar kinds of explanations were put forward to account for both plague and syphilis, frequently by the same physicians.4 Both were seen as virulent, intractable, and contagious. Traditional medicine, centred on the individual's receptiveness to particular diseases, failed to explain the rapid spread of these diseases or to come up with a successful cure.
- Matèries
- Història de la medicina
Medicina - Pesta i altres malalties
- URL
- https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978023052 ...
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