Medical Care in Early Modern Venice

Abstract

In early modern Venice, a wide range and large number of people offered care to the sick. This study utilizes Venice’s civic death registers to assess when and why the sick and dying accessed medical care, and how this changed over the course of the early modern period. The detailed registers permit consideration of the profile of medical practitioners, key aspects of patient identity, the involvement of institutions in the provision of medical care, and the relationship between type of illness and the propensity of the sufferer to seek medical support. This study assesses the type, number, density and distribution of practitioners in the city. Recourse to medical care was affected by age, social status and type of illness. A web of institutions increased levels of medical engagement amongst those of lower social status. Recourse to medical care by adults increased to a high level during the seventeenth century, and became near-universal by the end of the eighteenth century.