TY - JOUR
T1 - Underground and Over the Sea
T2 - More Community Prophylactics in Europe, 1100-1600
AU - Geltner, G.
AU - Weeda, Claire
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press.
Copyright:
This record is sourced from MEDLINE/PubMed, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Public health historians have repeatedly shown that the theory, policy, and practice of group prophylactics far predate their alleged birth in industrial modernity, and regularly draw on Galenic principles. While the revision overall has been successful, its main focus on European cities entails a major risk, since city dwellers were a minority even in Europe's most urbanised regions. At the same time, cities continue to be perceived and presented as typically European, which stymies transregional and comparative studies based at least in part on non- or extra-urban groups. Thus, any plan to both offer an accurate picture of public health's deeper past and fundamentally challenge a narrative of civilizational progress wedded to Euro-American modernity ("stagism") would benefit from looking beyond cities and their unique health challenges. The present article begins to do so by focusing on two ubiquitous groups, often operating outside cities and facing specific risks: miners and shipmates. Evidence for these communities' preventative interventions and the extent to which they drew on humoral theory is rich yet uneven for Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Methodological questions raised by this unevenness can be addressed by connecting different scales of evidence, as this article demonstrates. Furthermore, neither mining nor maritime trade was typically European, thus building a broader base for transregional studies and comparisons.
AB - Public health historians have repeatedly shown that the theory, policy, and practice of group prophylactics far predate their alleged birth in industrial modernity, and regularly draw on Galenic principles. While the revision overall has been successful, its main focus on European cities entails a major risk, since city dwellers were a minority even in Europe's most urbanised regions. At the same time, cities continue to be perceived and presented as typically European, which stymies transregional and comparative studies based at least in part on non- or extra-urban groups. Thus, any plan to both offer an accurate picture of public health's deeper past and fundamentally challenge a narrative of civilizational progress wedded to Euro-American modernity ("stagism") would benefit from looking beyond cities and their unique health challenges. The present article begins to do so by focusing on two ubiquitous groups, often operating outside cities and facing specific risks: miners and shipmates. Evidence for these communities' preventative interventions and the extent to which they drew on humoral theory is rich yet uneven for Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Methodological questions raised by this unevenness can be addressed by connecting different scales of evidence, as this article demonstrates. Furthermore, neither mining nor maritime trade was typically European, thus building a broader base for transregional studies and comparisons.
KW - Galenism
KW - humoral theory
KW - mines
KW - preindustrial Europe
KW - public health
KW - ships
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85102920320&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/jhmas/jrab001
DO - 10.1093/jhmas/jrab001
M3 - Article
C2 - 33616180
AN - SCOPUS:85102920320
SN - 0022-5045
VL - 76
SP - 123
EP - 146
JO - Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
JF - Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
IS - 2
ER -