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Contagion Theory and Contagion Practice in Fifteenth-Century Milan*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Ann G. Carmichael
Ann G. Carmichael*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

When used to understand and combat the spread of bubonic plague, "contagion" is not a very helpful term. Plague is ecologically a complex disease transmitted from rodents to humans via fleas, and human-to-human passage of the disease is uncommon. Moreover, humans do not form lasting immunity to plague and cannot maintain the microorganism in human populations in the absence of infected rodents and their fleas. There can be no "Typhoid Mary" figure in the passage of plague.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , Summer 1991 , pp. 213 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1991

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Footnotes

*

All manuscript materials are drawn from Milan, Archivio di Siato, and I am most grateful to the staff archivists who helped me in locating these materials. This paper was originally presented at a conference on the History of Disease sponsored by the Francis Wood Institute at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, March, 1988. I am grateful for the comments and suggestions of Ellen Dwyer, Arthur Field, Helen Nader, James C. Riley, Charles Rosenberg, Steven Stowe, and especially Katherine Park for guiding my revisions of the original paper. This research was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, #RH20835-87.

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