SUMMARY

The next two chapters are about plague, the most multifaceted of early modern diseases. Its fatal impact upon the population has aroused the interest of demographers, whilst social, religious and medical historians have examined the complex and often interrelated responses that it elicited. The medical understanding of the cause and spread of plague and of how to prevent and treat it was disseminated to the literate part of the population by numerous plague treatises, and by the advice of the College of Physicians appended to the Plague Orders (first issued in 1578 and unchanged until 1666), together with the Orders themselves and other national and local regulations which justified measures on medical grounds. After discussing the people whom medical writers believed were most liable to contract plague, I will consider a central issue: whether it was thought possible that plague could be treated. This basic question has been generally ignored by historians. As the answer was a qualified yes, the accounts about how the plague entered the body and where it came from were not put forward in the context of fatalistic despair. In chapter 7, the focus will be on the practical advice given on preventing plague and on the instructions on how to treat it.

Both chapters show that traditional medical knowledge from the regimen genre and from well-established theories of disease causation is prominent in the medical understanding of the plague.