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forth a terrible stench and infecting their neighbours and those with whom
they live.75The Sanità decreed that if any malfranciosati should refuse to enter the
hospital to be cared for, they would be banished from the city. as during
all epidemics, it was convenient to find a scapegoat, whether beggars,
prostitutes, or foreigners; public policy was guided by a mixture of
christian charity and intolerance.
other diseases were terrifyingly familiar. Bubonic plague, still the
century’s most feared infection, had not diminished in its fury in the cen-
tury and a half since its most violent outbreak during the Black death
of 1347–48. Plague epidemics were reported regularly in Venice during
the early modern period.76 although it is not always possible to identify
the exact disease involved in each pestilence, many were, in fact, plague.
However, other epidemic diseases struck with nearly equal ferocity, so
many that contemporaries referred to them all, simply, as peste—a term
that referred not only to bubonic plague but also to influenza, typhus,
meningitis, smallpox, and a host of other diseases—in fact, to any disease
that contemporaries regarded as contagious.
The defense of the city against the spread of epidemics fell to the
Provveditori alla Sanità [Public Health office], which was founded by
the Senate in 1478.77 The Health office’s duties also included enforcing
hygienic regulations, imposing standards for licensing medical practitio-
ners, regulating charlatans and itinerant healers, inspecting pharmacies,
approving patent medicines, and overseeing the lazaretto, where plague
victims were sequestered. By the middle of the 16th century, its duties had
expanded even further to include the marketing of meat, fish, fruit, grain,
oil, and wine; the water and sewage systems; hospitals and hostelries; beg-
gars and prostitutes; the cemeteries; and the Jewish community.78
75 Quoted in arrizabalaga et al., Great Pox, p. 166.
76 More than 50 plague epidemics were reported in the Venetian republic between
1400 and 1600. See richard Palmer, The Control of Plague in Venice and Northern Italy 1348–
1600 (Ph.d. diss., University of Kent at canterbury, 1978), pp. 328–37; and alfonso corradi,
Annali delle epidemie occorse in Italia dalle prime memorie fino al 1850 compilati con varie
note e dichiarazioni, 4 vols (Bologna, 1973).
77 Vanzan Marchini, I Mali. in addition, see Salvatore carbone, Provveditori e
sopraprovveditori alla Sanità della Repubblica di Venezia (rome, 1962); and cipolla, Public
Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance (cambridge, 1976).
78 cipolla, Public Health, p. 32.