Plague Hospitals, Poverty and the Provision of Medical Care in France, c.1450–c.1650

Neil Murphy

doi:10.1093/jsh/shab066

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the expansion of plague hospitals in early modern France. It shows that the development of these institutions was an urban initiative and that there was only limited involvement from the crown before the mid-seventeenth century. While there is a typically highly negative view of French plague hospitals, with these institutions being seen as death traps where the infected were simply sent to die, they played a vital role in providing the poor with access to specialist care. Plague hospitals were staffed by physicians, surgeons, nurses, and apothecaries, who provided a range of important medical treatments to the infected. Municipal governments developed these specialist hospitals for the plague sick—and only the plague sick—and sought to provide them with the type of environment early modern medical experts believed to be the most conducive for healing. The article situates the development of these hospitals within the wider context of health care provision in early modern France. Overall, it shows that the development of plague hospitals was a key manifestation of the drive toward providing professional medical care to the poor.

Highlights

This article examines the expansion of plague hospitals in early modern France
While these hospitals played a central role in the war against the plague in early modern France, they have been largely overlooked in the extensive work on both plague and the social history of medicine
Jean No€el Biraben, in his Les hommes et la peste, which remains the key study of plague in early modern France, only briefly discusses pest houses.[2]

Summary

Conclusion

The emergence of plague hospitals played an important role in the development of professional medical care in French hospitals. Colin Jones has demonstrated how the increased attention the French monarchy paid to the welfare of its soldiers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to important developments in the expansion of medical care.[163] In a similar way, the increased medical provision French municipal governments made available to poor plague sick from the mid-fifteenth century—especially as a result of the establishment of plague hospitals—played a crucial role the wider provision of medical care in early modern France. The royal government was not seeking to devise a new program of plague care Rather, it was asserting overall authority over the implementation of measures that had been designed and controlled by municipal councils during the previous two centuries. In the most recent study of plague in early modern France, Jo€el Coste provides a short discussion about how plague hospitals are represented in literary sources: Jo€el Coste, Representations et comportements en temps d’epidemie dans la litterature imprimee de peste, 1490–1725 (Paris, 2007), 622–34

See for instance

27. These links between plague and poverty have been most fully studied for Italy

56. See for example the use of those at Chambery and Troyes

Findings

91. See this point for Italy