Prologue • 13to their homes for treatment. The authorities gave in temporarily, but when
the soaring number of infected households made home care prohibitive, they
resumed the policy of mass internment of the sick poor in the lazaretto.^30
Most antisocial reactions to plague during its earliest visitations—vig-
ilante-like attacks on Jews and other scapegoats accused of poisoning wells
and other polluting acts—had virtually ceased by the sixteenth century, as
had state violence against violators of plague regulations. Instead, persons
who flagrantly violated plague regulations were imprisoned or placed in the
stocks at a prominent square as an example; the gallows were sometimes on
display but probably to scare people, since constables and judges had more
pressing duties.^31
The Italian city-states of Venice, Genoa, Florence, and Milan set the
standard of care for the rest of Europe during plague epidemics. Venice’s
trailblazing “old hospital” for poor plague patients opened in 1424 on an is-
land that had served as a hospice for pilgrims. A half-century later a “new
hospital” was added for “suspects” who might carry the plague because of
their contact with infected persons. The number of rooms or units in these
two facilities was initially in the low hundreds; in later epidemics, as many as
twelve hundred huts were set up on an island in the lagoon for the overflow
of suspects. The need was obvious: in principle, all infected houses were
closed up and the entire household was sent to some other facility until the
home could be fumigated and clothing and other suspect possessions burned.
By the end of the fifteenth century, most other northern Italian cities had
their own plague hospitals in place or under construction. The most ambi-
tious of these, Saint Gregory Hospital in Milan, dwarfed the city’s immense
cathedral and Venice’s pioneering plague facilities. Florence’s lazaretto was
more modest, but here and elsewhere a confraternity of Christian laypersons
filled many needs the public authorities could not handle. In the sixteenth
century the Florentine service group volunteered care for poor sick persons
in their homes and provisioned hundreds of huts for persons who had been
in contact with plague victims.^32 In one way or another, these Italian city-
states handled a staggering number of plague cases in sickness and in death.
During the epidemic of 1575 – 77 , made famous by Saint Charles Borromeo’s
caregiving in Milan, Venice counted more than nineteen thousand persons
who had expired in a hospital, plus some twenty-seven thousand who had
succumbed in their homes or elsewhere.^33
North of the Alps similar facilities came a century or more later. Amster-
dam’s large plague hospital was an impressive square structure with drinking
water for the inmates coursing through the courtyard in the middle. Paris’s