Public Health Problems in the Medieval Statutes of Croatian Adriatic Coastal Towns: From Public Morality to Public Health

Abstract

The article seeks out the regulations about public health in the oldest medieval statutes of fourteen cities of the eastern Croatian Adriatic coast, between the thirteenth and sixteenth century. The research revealed numerous examples of direct or indirect ways of protecting public health. Through the analyzed documents, a noteworthy relationship between public morality and public health can be noted. The described rules are important as a reflection of awareness about public health as a condition of survival and progress in the past. They witness a progressive transition from an original common law into a written law as well as the impact that religion had in influencing people's general opinion and lifestyle in light of public health problems.

Ritual household deposits and the religious imaginaries of early medieval Dalmatia (Croatia)

“…Bradley 2010;Hutton 2016). Even in Dalmatia, the city-statutes of Split (AD 1312), Trogir (AD 1322), Skradin (AD 1350), and Šibenik (AD 1379) state that a practitioner of magic or herbalist art (artes magicales bel herbariae) would be condemned to burn at the stake (Petaros et al 2013). The discovery of these objects in such a climate highlights again the complexity of religious/ritual expression.…”

The politics of environments before the environment: Biopolitics in the longue durée

“…It did inform proactive public intervention and sanitary legislation that aimed at protecting the populations' health and regulating the complex metabolism between cities and their surroundings. Whether it is in the Islamicate or the later Ottoman Empire, Medieval English towns or cities in France the Lowlands, the Italian peninsula or Adriatic towns in what is today Croatia (Leguay, 1999(Leguay, , 2002Vanzan Marchini, 2000;Geltner, 2012;Rawcliffe, 2013;Grmek, 1980;Petaros et al, 2013;Blažina-Tomić and Blažina, 2015;Skelton, 2015 for a later period), historians have brought to light a longer tradition of preventive measures that since the early thirteenth To be published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2021), Special Issue, "What counts as environment in biology and medicine: Historical, philosophical and sociological perspectives", Edited by Jan Baedke, Tatjana Buklijas. Pls refer and cite from final version century operated "for the benefit and health of all" showing a significant level of concern for the natural and the built environment (Geltner, 2019a for a rich overview).…”