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…
Tag: animals
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…
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…