Two monks and a woman helping the sick, after Jacopo Tintoretto, c. 1594. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Plague struck much of northern Italy and Sicily from 1575 to 1578. It was perhaps the most significant epidemic to afflict Italy and especially Venice since the fourteenth century. Between a third and a quarter of Venice’s population died. The plague transformed the city’s civic rituals and architectural tradition. Construction soon began on the Church of the Redentore, designed by Andrea Palladio, and the city inaugurated the Festa del Redentore (the Feast of the Redeemer) to celebrate the end of the plague, which is still commemorated every July with a procession and fireworks. The epidemic sparked an unparalleled wave of publications that narrated the unfolding of the calamity.
Among those treatises written by learned elites, Girolamo Mercuriale’s On Pestilence (1577) holds a notorious position in the history of medicine and epidemic disease. A number of Mercuriale’s contemporaries blamed him for misdiagnosing the plague and demanding the removal of the quarantine at Venice, a demand that Venice’s rulers met. His detractors believed his actions caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Venetians. Mercuriale’s perceived role in exacerbating the epidemic that devastated Venice’s population is central to the treatise’s arguments and the controversies that surrounded its publication. Recent scholarship has largely interpreted the treatise as an attempt to safeguard or revive his reputation and career, a career that had been up to this point spectacular.
By 1577 Mercuriale had already developed an international reputation and a long history with Venice. A native of Forlì, he took his medical degree from the College of Physicians of Venice in 1555. In 1562 he went to Rome, where he served as physician to Alessandro Farnese, a cardinal and great patron of the arts. In 1569 Mercuriale was appointed ordinary professor in practical medicine at Padua. In his first years there, he published an extensive, highly regarded work on cutaneous diseases and bodily excrement, and he treated the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, for which he was awarded the title of Count Palatine. If the goal of On Pestilence was to stabilize or even enhance his reputation, it likely succeeded. Despite discontent with his failure to diagnose the plague in Venice and Padua, Mercuriale remained a professor of medicine for nearly twenty-five more years, earning one of the highest salaries for his profession in all of Italy. He left Padua for the University of Bologna in 1587, accepting a lofty annual salary of 1,200 scudi, honorary citizenship, and an exemption from taxes.
Five years later he took up a position at Pisa, where he was paid 2,000 scudi a year. He innovated in the fields of gynecology, pediatrics, and toxicology, publishing numerous textbooks. He was regarded as being among the most important physicians and professors of medicine in Europe until his death in 1606.
On Pestilence offers slightly hidden justifications and rationales, if not rationalizations, for Mercuriale’s diagnosis, yet its historical significance does not end there. Mercuriale put forward a deeply learned understanding of plague that employed historical analyses of epidemics and made extensive recommendations for public health measures, a relative novelty for plague treatises.
Mercuriale was able to make more thorough historical comparisons than fourteenth- and fifteenth-century authors in part because he had access to a greater number of relevant primary sources, especially the writings of ancient Greek historians. Their works only began to circulate broadly in western Europe around the turn of the sixteenth century. Lorenzo Valla first translated Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, with its description of the Athenian plague (430–426 bc), into Latin in 1452, and it was not printed until 1483. Procopius’ The Persian War and Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things gained greater currency with physicians only at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Although Georg Agricola (1494–1555)—a physician, philologist, and expert on minerals and mining—briefly touched upon many plagues of antiquity in his own plague treatise, the only references to the Justinian plague were based not on Greek sources but on Gregory of Tours (538–594), who wrote in Latin.
The craft of history underwent significant changes in the first half of the sixteenth century. Scholars increasingly used critical and comparative techniques to judge the reliability of ancient and later writings while distancing themselves from medieval understandings of the past. Mercuriale honed his critical acumen on these newly available sources, contending that in order to classify and diagnose epidemics it was necessary to compare them to outbreaks of the past. Accordingly, he mined a broad range of ancient, medieval, and contemporary writings, bolstered by his own experiences, in an effort to understand the disaster that afflicted northern Italy. As a whole, the treatise is emblematic of Renaissance medical humanism, which employed comparative history and philology in its practice and theory. Mercuriale sought to redefine the concept of plague according to his reading of the Hippocratic Epidemics, while simultaneously putting forward a historical account of pestilences dependent on a panoply of descriptions of ancient epidemics, including the plague of Athens, the Antonine plague, the Justinian plague, and subsequent epidemics in the Byzantine Empire, and the medieval plagues that began in Europe in 1347 and continued throughout the early modern period.
Venice’s plague of 1575–77 was part of an epidemic that spread throughout the Italian peninsula and beyond. The plague had appeared in Trent and Sicily in May 1575 and arrived in Venice by July of that year. Nearly four thousand people died in a first wave that lasted until the winter, when the deaths subsided. By the late spring of 1576, few deaths were reported, but at the beginning of June 1576 the number of deaths increased, prompting thousands to evacuate the city and the Health Office to enact quarantines.
Quarantines in Venice during the sixteenth century entailed large-scale surveillance and intervention. The Health Office inspected those entering the city on suspicious ships, often those arriving from cities known to be suffering from plague. They also looked for Venetians with symptoms. The homes of those who died were shuttered, emptied, and cleaned. Anyone who had been in a condemned house was quarantined for eight days. Households suspected of harboring individuals exposed to plague were closed up for fourteen or twenty-two days. Many merchants arriving in the city were quarantined with their goods on the Lazzaretto Nuovo, a small island in the Venetian lagoon, together with convalescing patients. Employing threats of force, city officials brought the bodies of the dead and the individuals suffering the worst cases—many of whom were described as poor—to the Lazzaretto Vecchio. Dogs and cats were exterminated. Some Venetians who were described as being from the lower classes were reported as trying to hide their disease, partly because they feared the Health Office would incinerate their possessions, partly because they were scared of dying in the lazaretto.
Much of the population hated the quarantine, and the Venetian government grew concerned about its economic and political repercussions. Leaders worried that the loss of tax revenue caused by the ban of goods entering the city might weaken the republic’s defenses. A number of physicians from both Venice and Padua, including Mercuriale, were called to debate the cause of the disease before the doge and other dignitaries. The question at hand was whether the disease was “true plague” as the Health Office maintained. The other possibilities were that it was a less contagious disease, such as what was called pestilential or malign fever, or a less dangerous yet still communicable disease referred to as “contagious disease.” The definition and means for diagnosing “true plague,” a term that does not precisely correspond with modern medical categories, were subject to debate. The physicians of the Health Office preferred to look at symptoms, such as buboes and carbuncles, while Mercuriale forged a different path, concentrating on the cause, diffusion, and lethality of the disease.
At Venice, the physicians presented a range of views in front of the doge. Some endorsed the diagnosis of “true plague,” others posited that it was not plague but that it might escalate into “true plague,” and others declared that it was simply not plague at all. Mercuriale’s view corresponded with the last position, as he and Girolamo Capodivacca, his colleague at Padua, argued that the quarantine should be lifted. They offered to treat personally the sick on the condition that the government publicly declare that there was no plague in Venice and lift many of the restrictions intended to limit the spread of the disease.
The Venetian government accepted, against the wishes of the Health Office. According to a contemporary account, the doge, Alvise I Mocenigo, applauded the professors from Padua. The official historian of Venice, Andrea Morosini (1558–1618), wrote that the Venetian populace rejoiced. Mercuriale and Capodivacca, along with two surgeons, four Venetian physicians, and two Jesuit priests, treated patients, and their assistants lanced boils and let blood.
As public health measures were lifted and Mercuriale and his companions visited patients, the number of deaths increased throughout June. One of the Jesuits accompanying Mercuriale died. The other priest along with one of the surgeons became gravely ill. At the end of the month, Mercuriale and Capodivacca requested to return to Padua. Waiting in quarantine in Venice, the two physicians wrote a defense of their diagnosis, while others present in Venice, including the ambassador of Florence, blamed them for spreading the disease and for the rise in deaths. Mercuriale returned to Padua in July, where he found the university closed. The Venetian government reimposed the quarantine, which strained the city’s resources as hospitals filled. By November many of the sites were at or beyond capacity, and new plans were made to incinerate goods suspected of harboring infection rather than disinfect them by exposing them to the open air.
After the outbreak temporarily died down with the arrival of winter, the university reopened in January 1577, and Mercuriale began his lectures on the plague. The lectures presented a shifted position, as he agreed that the epidemic became “true plague,” but not until July and August 1576, after he had already left Venice. Girolamo Zacco, a Paduan physician who had studied at the university, recorded the lectures and saw to their publication. That spring, the plague returned to Venice, killing approximately another four thousand people, before being officially declared over in July 1577.
The unfolding of the plague in Venice in 1576 and Covid-19 in 2020 parallel each other in many ways. Mercuriale’s example illustrates that political power and medical expertise have interacted, in different guises, in past epidemics. Indeed, public health and politics are inseparable, since restrictions and rules invariably reflect the values and priorities of specific groups and pragmatic decisions do not naturally emerge from medical knowledge. Uncertainties about the course of disease and about the efficacy of remedies render foresight problematic.
Governments and populations often hesitate to impose or accept highly restrictive measures until the effects of the disease are dire. Public health actions can even be seen as experiments. Judgments about who was right or wrong can be hard to establish. It is possible to condemn Mercuriale for his misdiagnosis of the plague and the lifting of the quarantine. Yet it is also possible to sympathize with those he sought to save, who feared, perhaps rightly, that being sent to quarantine in the lazaretto was in essence a death sentence. Lifting Venice’s quarantine in 1576 might even be considered the correct decision given the possible vectors of the disease.
Was Mercuriale merely a scapegoat for a disaster that would have ensued no matter what he decided? If early modern physicians were unaware of what modern scientists deem to be the cause of the disease, should the quarantines be judged to be merely quaint, ineffective measures—not unlike bloodletting or applying chicken cloaca—that disproportionately weighed on the poor and foreigners? Or might the quarantine have mitigated the disease by reducing the circulation of goods and people and by destroying furnishings, bedding, clothes, and other potential homes to rats and fleas? Even if quarantines and sanitary cordons were ineffective, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century officials in France, Portugal, England, and the Netherlands considered Venice’s methods successful and emulated them.
A number of social factors in Mercuriale’s time mirror those of 2020. Although the lazaretto was used less as a means to control the poor in Venice than it was in Florence and other Italian cities, nevertheless social standing greatly determined how one experienced the plague. Residential institutions presented significant risks to their occupants. Wealthy Venetians fled to country estates or stayed in vast palaces, while the city’s poor, crowded into small dwellings or shipped to the lazaretto, died in far greater numbers. Many Venetians rebelled against governmental surveillance and restrictions. The rich purchased medicines and fumigants composed of spices and other costly ingredients; the indigent subsisted on substandard and spoiled food. A flood of printed sources shaped public perceptions, describing the horrors of the sickness and speculating about its causes.
Historical investigation, along with cutting-edge medical knowledge, guided Mercuriale, just as it does many today. Yet neither can guarantee success. The past might teach lessons about pandemics, but even what those lessons are is part of historical debate.
Excerpted from On Pestilence: A Renaissance Treatise on Plague by Girolamo Mercuriale; translated and with an introduction by Craig Martin. Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press. Excerpted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.
