Carole Rawcliffe. Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities.

Abstract

This handsomely produced book systematically dismantles a stubborn Victorian-era notion: that medieval England was squalid, unhealthy, and devoid of sensible medical approaches to protect the public's health. Prominent sanitarians and political reformers of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries used the medieval era as cautionary opprobrium to reinforce their recommended medical and public health policies. Carole Rawcliffe finds Victorian contempt resilient, even though the historical evidence for such claims was undermined as early as the 1930s. More recently, historians of Renaissance Italian medicine bolstered the old view by drawing a further contrast between late medieval England and the progressive, seemingly modern innovations of Mediterranean city- and territorial states. Italian cities, impressively larger and richer than most of England's urbanized settlements, well before the Black Death spent public money on the recruitment and retention of prestigious public physicians; invested both before and after the coming of vicious plagues in urban hospitals with medical, rather than hospice, objectives; and invented new approaches to surveillance and containment of recurrent plagues. By contrast we find no similar, concerted interventions in England until the time of the Reformation. Rawcliffe does not ask why the English did not follow continental trends; rather she argues that much of this approach to the study of medieval English cities is an unhelpful and anachronistic “medical materialism” (p. 19). Her response is the first chapter's engaging title: “Less Mud-Slinging and More Facts.”