The Path to Pistoia: Urban Hygiene Before the Black Death*

Abstract

When the Black Death struck Western Europe in late 1347, city dwellers across the region were already practising public health, in part by building, maintaining and monitoring infrastructures whose prophylactic value emerged from the experience of intensified urbanization. The demands of a new urban metabolism, evident from the twelfth century, prompted numerous cities, including Pistoia, to develop preventative health programmes in anticipation of and in response to diverse threats. The latter certainly included famine, floods, pestilence and war, but Pistoians and others were no less concerned by routine matters such as burials, food quality, travel and work safety, artisanal pollution and domestic waste disposal. All of these were recognized as impacting people’s health, based on the medical and natural-philosophical theories prevalent at the time, and their management took into consideration not only climactic conditions and multi-species behaviour, but also the smooth functioning of sites such as wells, canals, bridges and roads. The political value that municipalities and other stakeholders began to place on the upkeep of these sites exceeded their economic function and thus questions the seminal role that scholars tend to attribute to the second plague pandemic in public health history. It also demonstrates how a key aspect of Euro-American modernity continues to shape interpretations of urban and health histories and suggests a broader path for historicizing community prophylactics.

An unproblematized truth: Foucault, biopolitics, and the making of a sociological canon

“…Certainly, in some cases, the bubonic plague worked as a catalyst for strengthening health measures or making medical advice literature (so called consilia) more popular and widely read. However, several of these measures and urban statutes of preventive health did predate-by several decades-the Black Death (Geltner 2020). Even more importantly, historians have questioned the same distinction between epidemic and endemic disease as a post-bacteriology understanding that does not capture the complexity of medieval public health where often fighting corrupted air or quarantining infected bodies should be seen in a logical continuum (Crawshaw 2016).…”

The Healthscaping Approach: Towards a Global History of Early Public Health

“…This is for instance why even those public health historians willing to give earlier civilizations the benefit of the doubt when it comes to prevention, have tended to focus on people's responses to the Justinianic Plague or the Black Death, and rarely looked beyond cities' wellintentioned but ultimately "failed" attempts to block the spread of epidemic disease (Berridge 2016, 35). This, despite strong evidence for routine interventions outside the context of major disruptions such as famine, war or pandemics (Mordechai and Eisenberg 2019;Geltner 2020).…”

Developing a new cultural policy agenda for Pistoia: The current and projected role of artists and creative workers in the territory

“…Veluzzi (2019) in his work concentrates on the historical formation of the city and building of the first religious monuments finding a geometric genesis and pattern in which there was a very specific reasoning behind the urban planning. On the other hand, when the historical importance of the city and art history considered, it is possible to find plenty of scholarly works (Tigler 2011;Matteuzzi 2016;Geltner 2020;Paradiso et al, 2020;Corio 2021).…”