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77 Five Continuity and Change Magic, Religion, Medicine, and Science, 500–1700 As we have seen, the Western world experienced new diseases in the late medieval and early modern ages. Although in some respects those periods of Western history present remarkable continuities in human responses to disease , some important new thinking about nature and disease also developed. This chapter will first discuss widely shared social and individual responses, and then consider new ideas that undermined many of the premises on which those responses were based Between the fifth and the eighteenth centuries the people of the West lived predominantly , or even overwhelmingly, in rural surroundings. Human and animal muscle performed most work. Beliefs in supernatural powers explained the workings of the universe, whether those beliefs were simply grounded in traditional folk culture or highly elaborated in Thomistic Aristotelianism. Life expectancy remained low and disease most often inspired fatalism, however much beliefs about diseases and their causes may have changed. To such a sweeping set of generalizations must be added many qualifying caveats. In some areas—northern Italy and the Netherlands, for example—urban life early assumed considerable importance and fundamentally changed economies and societies. The “simple machines” of the science of mechanics, such as wedges and levers, magnified muscle power, while wind and water alike were harnessed in a variety of ways. By the eighteenth century the supernatural powers of the universe retreated (at least for some thinkers) into the distant recesses of a mechanical deity musclebound by the laws of human reason. But the ailments of Western people, and the responses to them, remained on the whole remarkably constant. Those responses included the employment of a few pain-dulling narcotics and appeals to religion, to “magic,” to the services of a wide range of empirics, and to the official mercies of professional medicine. Sometimes those responses overlapped; indistinct boundaries divided science, religion, magic, empirical healing, and folk custom. And to some undoubtedly considerable extent, people also responded to their ills by doing nothing, sometimes with iron stoicism, sometimes with vocal complaints of a kind as familiar to the twelfth century as to the twenty-first. Much of this book concerns the effects of, and response to, more or less violent epidemic visitations: plague, leprosy, smallpox, tuberculosis. But all through the medieval and early modern periods everyday ailments affected the people of the West as well. Many of those troubles stemmed from nutritional deficiencies. Others were not so much chronic as occasional, especially the wide range of gastrointestinal disorders and the even wider variety of viral ailments and “colds.” Some natural immunity to those complaints might develop, but the causative viruses themselves underwent frequent variation. A population that worked with the strength of its muscles and the leverage of its bones fell victim to osteoarthritis , bursitis, rheumatism, and other sorts of aches and pains. Diseases of physical degeneracy and aging awaited those who survived epidemic infections; cancerous tumors were well known; and psychiatric illness, called by a wide range of names and treated in an equally wide range of ways over these centuries, added to popular burdens. And of course difficult physical work often meant high rates of accidental injury; the maimed were a common sight in the medieval and early modern centuries, the products of accident, violence, birth defect, or progressive disease. Modes of Healing For centuries people of Western civilization found in alcohol (sometimes in combination with opium or mandrake) their first defense against pain, and some evidence suggests that alcoholic drinks became more important and pervasive in the later Middle Ages, perhaps as a consequence of the greater disposable income available in the labor-scarce, land-cheap economy of the years after the onset of plague.1 But when the consolations of alcohol failed to relieve pain or banish care about illness, sufferers called for the aid of others. Those others might employ religion, magic, empirical remedies, and perhaps “medicine”; and while those categories were partially congruent, a consideration of each of them may clarify attitudes toward disease and practices of healing in the long preindustrial, preurban age of Western history. Religion Christian religious practices played a major healing role. For a start, God’s will loomed as a major—perhaps the major—etiological explanation of disease, a notion that certainly antedated Christianity but that Christians maintained. Particularly important in medieval Christianity were the cults of the 78 The Burdens of Disease [18.188.40.207] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 13:05...

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