The murderous metaphor

The search for the causes of the plague, as well as the experimentation with remedies to treat a disease considered fatal but not incurable, put medieval medicine to the test of its own scholarly rationality. How could the contagion observed, but not explained, be incorporated? The transmission of disease is first and foremost a metaphor for the contagion of sins, making manifest the power of the imagination: this is why medieval compassio inspires policies that are not always compassionate.

Contents

• "Deadly or mortiferous, contagious, fiery, cruel..." maurice de La Porte's epithets for the plague in 1571 (Véronique Montagne, "Le Discours didascalique sur la peste dans les traités médicaux de la Renaissance : rationaliser et/ou inquiéter", Réforme, Humanisme, Renaissance, 2010)
• "Aspre, noire, charbonneuse..." (Jon Arrizabalaga, "Facing the Black Death: perceptions and reactions of university medical practitioners", in Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham and Luis García-Ballester eds, Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, Cambridge, 1994)
• Black Death and blue fear in 1832 (Justus Hecker, Der schwarze Tod im vierzehnten Jahrhundert: Nach den Quellen für Ärzte und gebildete Nichtärzte bearbeitet, Berlin, 1832)
• Du rouge au noir, le mauvais sang de la mélancolie (Marie-Christine Pouchelle, "Les appétits mélancoliques", Médiévales, 1983)
• With the body as screen and tomb: diagnosis, prognosis and medical semiology
• Histories of pain, from the first symptoms to the appearance of buboes
• In search of the signum mortis : "the movement of death is not as certain as that of life" (Bernard de Godon, Liber pronosticorum, 1295, quoted by Danielle Jacquart, "Le Difficile Pronostic de mort (^XIVe- XVe^siècles )", Médiévales, 2004)
• Was medieval medicine shameful? Rationality regimes and textual diversity in the Pestschiften (Karl Sudhoff)
• Abraham Caslari's Treatise on Pestilential Fevers and Other Forms of Fever (Ron Barkai, "Jewish Treatise on the Black Death (1350-1500): A Preliminary Study", in Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham and Luis García-Ballester eds, Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, London, 1998)
• 'Eliyahu ben 'Avraham at the court of Selim^I in Constantinople and the medicalization of political knowledge about the plague in the Ottoman Empire (Nükhet Varlik, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World. The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600, Cambridge, 2015)
• Écrire avant, pendant et après la peste : le manuscrit latin 111227 de la BnF et le Compendium de epidemia de la Faculté de médecine de Paris (Danielle Jacquart, La Médecine médiévale dans le cadre parisien, ^{XIVe-XVesiècle} , Paris, 1998)
• "At the sight of effects whose cause escapes the perspicacity of the best intelligences, the human mind falls into astonishment"(Compendium de epidemia, 1348)
• The limits of medical reason in the face of the "marvellous effects" of a fatal but not incurable disease
• The astral conjunction of 1345, remota causa of pestilence
• Recours à l'astrologie et inflexion alchimique du discours médical: une défaite de la raison? (Nicolas Weill-Parot, "La rationalité médicale à l'épreuve de la peste: médecine, astrologie et magie (1348-1500)", Médiévales, 2004)
• The therapeutic use of wealth: drinking gold and precious stones
• Air vicié, venin et contrepoison (Nicolas Weill-Parot, "Des rationalités en concurrence? Empirica magiques et médecine scolastique", Anuario de Estudios Medievales, 2013)
• Ventouser, scarifier, cauterizer: the incision of buboes in Guy de Chauliac's Grande Chirurgie (1363)
• La recette du jeune poulet au croupion déplumé (Jacme d'Agramont, Regiment de preservacio de pestilencia, 1348)
• Empirica, experimenta or secreta ? Longevity, obstinacy and creativity of a "paper experiment" (Erik A. Heinrichs, Erik Heinrichs, "The Live Chicken Treatment for Buboes: Trying a Plague Cure in Medieval and Early Modern Europe", Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2017)
• "Why do some diseases make those who come near them sick, while no one is cured by health?"(Problemata, VII, 4)
• Compassion and the power of imagination (Béatrice Delaurenti, La Contagion des émotions. Compassio, une énigme médiévale, Paris, 2016)
• Dispositio morbida and specific form, or how to integrate the unexplained of human contagion into the explicable system of humors
• Cette " effrayante maladie qui nous envahit " : Gentile da Foligno, du commentaire du Canon d'Avicenne au Consilia contra pestilentiam (Joël Chandelier, Avicenne et la médecine en Italie. Le Canon dans les universités (1200-1350), Paris, 2017)
• "If we are asked: how can we rely on the theory of contagion(da'wa-l-adwa) when the law denies this, we reply: the existence of contagion is solidly established by experience, by study, by perception, by observation and by the frequency of data. These are the elements of proof" (Ibn al-Hatib, Celle qui convainc le poseur de questions sur la maladie terrifiante, 1348, quoted in François Clément, "À propos de la Muqni'at al-sa'id d'Ibn al-Hatib sur la peste à Grenade en 1348-1349", in Id. ed., Epidemies, épizooties. Des représentations anciennes aux approches actuelles, Rennes, 2017)
• Arab medicine and the rejection of magical forms of contagion (Justin Stearns, Infectious ideas. Infectious ideas. Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean, Baltimore, 2011)
• Defilement, stain and infection: only sins are contagious (Aurélien Robert, "Contagion morale et transmission des maladies: histoire d'un chiasme (^{XIIIe-XIXesiècle} )", Tracés, 2011)
• Why isolate lepers? The morbus contagiosus of disease and the macule of sin (Maaike van der Lugt, "Les maladies héréditaires dans la pensée scolastique", in L'Hérédité entre Moyen Âge et époque moderne, Florence, 2008)
• Pollution, contagion, scandal (Arnaud Fossier, "La contagion des péchés (^{XIe-XIIIesiècle} )", Tracés, 2011)
• The evil eye, lovesickness and the power of women (Mary F. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages. The "Viaticum" and Its Commentaries, Philadelphia, 1990)
• Love, alteration of the mind, melancholy: "The contagion of love operates easily and becomes the most serious plague of all" (Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Banquet, VII, 5, 1469)
• Girolamo Fracastoro and his De Contagione et contagionis Morbis (1546): a false naturalist breakthrough
• Medieval plague pharmacy and pharmakon
• "That gasping tongue, huge and fat, first white, then red, then black, and as if charcoal and cracked..." (Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre de la peste, 1938)
• From murderous metaphor to analogy: when language goes berserk, violence can begin