Plague Hospitals: Public Health for the City in Early Modern Venice

Abstract

Although the development of hospitals in late medieval and early modern Europe has hardly been ignored by historians of medicine, Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw argues that hospitals focused on the treatment of plague are different creatures that deserve separate study. In this book, she offers a history of the two plague hospitals, or lazaretti, of Venice, while also taking some stock of developments elsewhere. Stevens Crawshaw sets out to provide more than an isolated institutional history by including broader issues of social, medical, and political context and argues that the Venetian lazaretti were much more than a dreadful purgatory simply meant to warehouse doomed souls until they met their inevitable death. Stevens Crawshaw organizes her book around what she sees as the “stages in a patient's experience of the lazaretti” (36). Following a lengthy introduction, her chapters address, in turn, architecture, patients, staff, treatments, and death in the hospitals. A sixth chapter, Returning to the City, covers the release of people and goods from the hospitals. A short conclusion and a further epilogue round out the book with a glance at the institutions' legacy as the plague epidemics faded.

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