Where the Middle Ages Begin
To appreciate the importance of the biological effects of disease on a society’s lived experience, it can be useful to look at modern examples. Polio provides an excellent example. Children who survive an infection of polio – and escape the neurological incapacitation that can result in disability up to paraplegia – have a fifty percent chance of suffering the similar effects of post-polio syndrome later in life.
The differences in the imposition of serfdom led to different economic and political effects for the peasantry in Europe. In Western Europe, wages rose, grain prices fell, and the consumption of meat, dairy products, and beer increased. More and more peasants moved into a widening “middle class” that could afford to buy manufactured goods.
For centuries in Christian society people have made direct connections between the outbreak of epidemic disease and Doomsday.
The purpose of this study is to determine whether the Black Death was similarly selective with respect to biological sex-that is, did either sex face an elevated risk during the epidemic or were men and women at equal risk of dying?
Standards of hygiene in the Middle Ages appeared high enough to prevent diseases as medieval Europeans, contrary to popular beliefs, bathed quite often. However, contact with domestic animals, which were frequently kept in the part of the house reserved for human activity, exposed people to animal-related diseases passed to humans via insects.
The story begins with two tin pilgrim ampullae2 made before 1220 in Canterbury, England, that were found centuries later, one in France (now in the Cluny Museum) and one in Norway (now in the Historical Museum in Bergen, Norway).
Madness has been long misrepresented in medieval studies. Assertions that conceptions of mental illness were unknown to medieval people, or that all madmen were assumed to be possessed by the devil, were at one time common in accounts of medieval society.
This paper situates The Pied Piper story as an exilic narrative, part of a larger repertoire of stories that follow the romantic quest-myth formula, a formula that conveys a totla metaphor for the “journey of life”.
Ergotism appeared in Europe in the early Middle Ages and manifested itself in gangrenous or convulsive forms. Between 1085 and 1927 epidemics of convulsive ergotism were widespread east of the Rhine in Europe
Health and dietetics constitute the basic concepts of preventive medicine constructed by medieval and Latin Galenism, i.e. the medical theories of Galen (second century) transmitted by Arab commentators (Avicenna, among others). Over time, the concept of health with respect to the human body changed according to specific socio-historic contexts.
As syphilis crept up from southern Italy the Nuremberg city council, like many leaders elsewhere, prepared for the impending onslaught of this mysterious new disease. As the highest political authority in the city, the council considered the health of its citizens its responsibility.
This includes information about the geographical spread and extent of the initial outbreak in the time of Justinian (541–543), the chronology of later outbreaks, the pathology of the disease, its occurrence among animals…
Michelle Ziegler examines the questions on why does plagues seemed so much worse in the Middle Ages. Why did medieval populations die so much more frequently? Was it because of malnutrition?
Most Byzantine physicians described several types of arthritis that resemble rheumatoid arthritis, chronic deformans polyarthritis and gout.
It requires an enormous burden of proof for any microscopic organism to be held responsible for killing roughly 30-40 percent of the population of Europe, or an estimated 17 to 28 million people from 1347-1352. Since the isolation and description of Yersinia pestis at the end of the “golden age” of microbiology in 1894, by the Swiss-French bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, it is widely held that the small bacterium was responsible for the Black Death and several more pandemics that followed in Europe and Asia.
Since most of the surviving mentions of wellness relate to the health of the soul, it is not clear what constituted a healthy Anglo-Saxon body. This paper will use the Old English poem Soul and Body and Old English medical texts to explore Anglo-Saxon bodily wellness.
This paper will review the most important of these concepts about delirium, from ancient times until the appearance of the two classification systems. Special attention will be paid to the question of how those concepts have dealt with the particular problems posed by prognosis and outcome.
The name syphilis came into common usage. It came from a Latin epic poem Syphilis, sive Morbvs Gallicvs, written by Girolamo Fracastoro or Hieronymus Fracastorius(1483–1553). In his work De contagione et contagiosis morbis, he discussed the nature and the spread of infectious diseases, foretelling the germ theory of disease.
The number of syphilis cases at the Skriðuklaustur monastery is unexpectedly high, as nine individuals with the disease have been identified in a skeletal assemblage totalling only 198 skeletons. At least two of the cases bear the signs of congenital syphilis. The youngest individual was just an adolescent at death but still showed severe symptoms of congenital syphilis that had developed to the tertiary stage.
It is tempting to explain the late medieval attitude toward death as a direct result of the Black Death, which caused massive loss of life and brought about a new awareness of the fact that death could come at any time. While this generalization is not completely false, there are several issues of timing. The fear of sudden death was not new.
A similar strategy was used in the busy Mediterranean sea- port of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia). After a visitation of the black death, the city’s chief physician, Jacob of Padua, advised establishing a place outside the city walls for treatment of ill townspeople and outsiders who came to town seeking a cure. The impetus for these recommendations was an early contagion theory, which promoted separation of healthy persons from those who were sick.
The concept of ‘quarantine’ is radically embedded in local and global health practices and culture, attracting heightened interest during episodes of perceived or actual epidemics. The term, however, evokes a variety of emotions, such as fear, resentment, acceptance, curiosity and perplexity, reactions often to be associated with a lack of knowledge about the origins, meaning, and rel- evance of quarantine itself.
This study will examine in particular the reactions of the people living close to the Danube River and its catchment area in “Austria” between the 14th and 17th centuries.
Medieval medicine as a scientific discipline was constituted generally in the 11th and 12th century on the basis of Latin translations of Arabic and Greek medical texts.
As the dance turned epidemic, troubled nobles and burghers consulted local physicians. Having excluded astrological and supernatural causes, the members of the medical fraternity declared it to be a ‘natural disease’ caused by ‘hot blood’.
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