Mormando Response to Plague
Introduction: Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy: What the Primary Sources, Printed and Painted, Reveal Franco Mormando “Will you believe such things, oh posterity, when we ourselves who see them can scarcely believe them and would consider them dreams except that we perceive them awake and with our eyes open and that after viewing a city full of funerals we return to our homes only to find them empty of our loved ones?” Francesco Petrarca, Rerum familiarum libri, VIII:7,Letter to His “Socrates” on the Black Death 1 i. Plague and Art: The Subject of this Exhibition Dateline, New York City, Thursday, 7 November, 2002:“A 53-year-old New Mexico man was in critical condition last night at Beth Israel Medical Center with bubonic plague, the rare and deadly disease that once decimated Europe, health officials said. His wife, a 47-year-old woman, remains under observation at Beth Israel as tests for the disease are conducted.”This report from the New York Times,2 repeated in newspapers across the country, took many Americans by surprise: bubonic plague, in their minds, had been relegated to the realm of the remote past and of the almost-legendary. In fact, this ancient enemy, the scourge of Europe for more than three hundred years, has never been completely wiped from the face of the earth. Nowadays, thanks to antibiotics, wonder drugs unavailable to medieval and early mod- ern Europeans, bubonic plague is easily treated and no longer a grave public health threat. Yet, even with the availability of modern wonder drugs, human society remains to this day threatened by other forms of deadly, contagious disease for which there exists no effec- tive “silver bullet” treatment.
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