In 1744, an epizootic of cattle plague broke out in the Netherlands. This was the second such outbreak that the Netherlands experienced during the eighteenth century, the first having occurred from 1713 to 1720. This cattle disease was likely the virus known as rinderpest. Declared eradicated in 2011, rinderpest was a contagious morbillivirus affecting cows…
Author: Amanda Coate
Amanda Coate is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Stanford University. She is broadly interested in the cultural and intellectual histories of 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Her dissertation examines hunger and food scarcity in Europe ca. 1500-1700, and seeks to understand how early modern people experienced, conceptualized, and dealt with their own and others’ hunger. Her other research interests include the history of science and medicine and human-animal interactions. She received a B.A. from Cornell University and an M.A. from Stanford University.
Harmful or Healthful? Medical Perspectives on Cannibalism in Early Modern Europe
When syphilis broke out in Europe during the late fifteenth century, people debated the disease’s origins. Many believed that it had arrived from the recently encountered “New World” (Eamon 2), but Bolognese surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti (1517-88) proposed that the outbreak was caused by cannibalism that had occurred during the French invasion of Naples in 1494….
Human Health, Animal Health
This past summer, I spent some time in the British Library paging through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical recipe books. My primary interest was finding remedies relating to appetite and the stomach. As someone who is interested in the history of animal-human interactions, however, I could not help noticing that some of these manuscripts contained remedies…
“It hath left behind it so foul and filthy broad scars, that touched the lives of four persons”: Stories of Medical Malpractice in Elizabethan England
In the preface to his 1588 treatise on surgery, Elizabethan surgeon William Clowes declared to his reader that “mine intent is not to hold my tongue at abuses” (A prooued practise sig. A1r). Thus began a section in which he discussed several stories of medical malpractice.1 In one, he described a “pernicious pill” that had…
Boccaccio’s Two Little Pigs: Animal Deaths during the Black Death
In his account of the 1348 plague outbreak in Florence, Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio described the deaths of two pigs who had been exposed to the clothes of a plague victim. He explained: One day […] the rags of a pauper who had died from the disease were thrown into the street, where they…