Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Maps
- Introduction: A ‘Healthfull and Pleasant’ City
- Part I Health and Place in Texts and Images
- Part II Health and the Landscape
- Part III Governing the City and the Self
- Epilogue
- Appendix I A Note About Pathogens and Retrospective Diagnosis
- Appendix II A Note About the Population of Norwich, 1100–1600
- Appendix III A Note on the Historiography and Archaeological Record of Norwich
- Appendix IV Map of Norwich Parishes
- Bibliography
- Index
- York Medieval Press: Publications
Part II - Health and the Landscape
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Maps
- Introduction: A ‘Healthfull and Pleasant’ City
- Part I Health and Place in Texts and Images
- Part II Health and the Landscape
- Part III Governing the City and the Self
- Epilogue
- Appendix I A Note About Pathogens and Retrospective Diagnosis
- Appendix II A Note About the Population of Norwich, 1100–1600
- Appendix III A Note on the Historiography and Archaeological Record of Norwich
- Appendix IV Map of Norwich Parishes
- Bibliography
- Index
- York Medieval Press: Publications
Summary
In writing the history of health care, it is clearly important to respect indigenous categories … A [broad] conception of the topic is called for: one that gives due weight to ritualism and symbolism, as we define them; and one that, equally, takes past conceptions of heath seriously … The symbolic might be just as important as the material. That is, purity and community may be as desirable as health in a biomedical sense.
What people think can be determined in two ways: firstly, from what they profess (write, depict or say), and secondly, from the evidence of what they do. Having established what men and women in Norwich and the region professed to believe about the interconnected nature of the human body and the wider environment, we can now determine how they actually used the space around them when prioritizing concerns about health and about disease. Part II of this book contrasts the idealized image of the city constructed by Cuningham with circumstances ‘on the ground’. It brings together evidence from archaeology, osteoarchaeology and the documentary record to illustrate ways in which health culture was experienced and enacted in Norwich during our period. The resulting picture presents a philosophy of the body which is quintessentially civic. Although Norwich's native medical culture complemented, and encompassed, the ancient hygienic scheme, it was broader, and had particularly urban concerns at its heart: the differentiation of persons according to status, and the value of property, of appropriate forms of corporate action and of individual responsibility. The following chapters offer two case studies on these themes. The first (which focuses predominantly on the initial 250-year period covered by this volume) takes people, disease and landscape as its leitmotifs; the second picks up developments from the fifteenth century onwards, and focuses on the city's healthy spaces. Both give us the opportunity to calibrate our notion of the constituent elements of pre-modern health culture; in both, the question of the nature and limits of the evidence is also kept in mind. Together, they locate sickness and pollution, poverty and salubrity in the city landscape: factors which throw light on the physical, economic and social categories at the heart of Norwich's ‘indigenous’ health culture. Our evidence base is composed of the rites and practices of pre-modern urban dwellers – of funerary customs, dramatic performances, recreations, therapeutic activities and pastimes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Health and the CityDisease, Environment and Government in Norwich, 1200–1575, pp. 87 - 88Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015