Plague Hospitals: Public Health for the City in Early Modern Venice by Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw (review)

Jane Stevens Crawshaw’s new study of Venice’s two bubonic plague hospitals— known collectively as the lazaretti—places these institutions within the wider social and charitable history of Venice. In a field that often focuses on the immediate crisis of epidemics and their devastation, Crawshaw’s contribution to scholarship lies in her meticulous, dispassionate study of these institutions as part of a permanent response to public health. Venice’s practice of providing permanent hospitals complete with a full roster of medical, administrative, and religious staff ready to care for those sick with bubonic plague, even during periods without epidemics, enhanced the city’s reputation for safety and thereby enabled the city to maintain trading relations with other cities.

Although the lazaretti may have done little to improve the overall survival of individuals during epidemics, these hospitals nonetheless brought the afflicted into a system of medical, religious, and charitable care. Crawshaw reminds readers of the important role these institutions played in caring for the souls of the sick and dying: the lazaretti employed a chaplain, dressed in a wax hooded cloak to minimize risk of infection, to hear patients’ confessions as soon as possible and administer the Eucharist. A good death—mediated through the proper rituals—was deeply important to early modern Venetians. Her book’s strength is her emphasis on understanding these institutions within their context: the result is a more generous interpretation of the lazaretti’s role and purpose than previously assumed.

Little is known about the experiences of individual patients or about the types of patients within the lazaretti since the hospital entry records did not survive. By exploiting a variety of archival sources and unpublished contemporary manuscripts, Crawshaw succeeds in patching together a convincing portrait of the patient population within the lazaretti: they came from all social ranks and all religions—Jews, Christians, and “Turks”—but were more likely to be poor. The hospitals were not specifically designated for the poor, but the poor did not have the option of quarantine at home, since only airy, spacious homes could be approved as suitable for that purpose. Only a few personal letters survive, notably those written in 1675 by a merchant who fell sick after returning from Constantinople. He described his pain, fever, lack of appetite—and his regret at his inability to digest the “very good wine” served at the lazaretto vecchio (p. 97). The impression conveyed by these letters written during a nonepidemic period are distinctive from those during the major epidemic periods of 1575–77 and 1630–31, in which contemporary visitors described hellish conditions in which the stench of dead bodies overwhelmed the senses and hospital authorities struggled to maintain adequate supplies of food, drink, and medicines to patients. An estimated 25,970 men and women entered the lazaretti during the outbreak in the year 1576, a number that suggests the considerable strain placed upon resources during epidemics.

Crawshaw has much richer material to mine to describe the lives and activities of hospital employees. The job of Prior was a sought-after, respectable post; even during an outbreak in 1557, twenty candidates stood for election as Prior of the lazaretto vecchio. At the other end of the spectrum were the pizzigamorti, or body clearers, a dangerous and stigmatized job: convicted criminals took the job in exchange for clean criminal records, while the impoverished jumped at the cash bonuses. One of the primary functions of the lazaretti was to disinfect goods before transport to Venice: more than a hundred people were involved in the work of disinfection during the sixteenth century, a labor-intensive job involving three steps—air, clean, and perfume. The sheer volume of goods meant that employees had to prioritize those items thought to be most likely to spread infection: fabrics and furs. The difficulty of supervising this vast operation resulted in periodic thefts of goods, a...