Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville by Kristy Wilson Bowers (review)

Despite the long interest of historians and the general public in medicine and disease throughout the world, few works in English focus on the Iberian peninsula. In this short and tightly written text, Bowers introduces specialists and neophytes to the abundant evidence that places Spain, and particularly Seville’s physicians and public-health practitioners, at the center of the transformations that occurred in early modern Europe. Why the choice of Seville? This city was the monopoly port for Spain’s navigation and trade with the Indies for more than two centuries. It served as the commercial hub of the first global empire, especially after the incorporation of Portugal and its colonial holdings from 1580 to 1640. Although geographically at the periphery, it was at the center of the exchange of ideas—especially the wisdom of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars and doctors who had lived in Andalusia for centuries. The city housed persistent clusters of merchants and bankers from Florence, Genoa, and even the Hapsburg Empire, as well as Portuguese ship captains and sailors. By the third decade of the sixteenth century, after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca states, and treasures began to flow from the Americas, Seville had grown large enough to permit several communicable diseases to become endemic. Although some of them, such as smallpox and measles, extracted a heavy toll, they largely took the young. The Spaniards viewed them as inevitable, part of God’s unknowable plan.

The epidemics most feared were those that broke out intermittently and swept away both adults and children. The plague, in bubonic or pneumonic forms, erupted periodically in Spain for generations following its catastrophic appearance in the mid-fourteenth century. Sixteenth-century observers saw it as the primary threat to public health, given its symptoms, high mortality, and impact on the local and regional economy. It seemed to be one of those diseases that might be stopped by quarantine, nursing, and perhaps medication. When first apprised of the plague, city and local officials, as well as those at the royal court, feverishly set out to verify its existence and nature, and then to mount effective measures to block its spread.

Bowers studies the correspondence and actions of the city council, the royal governor, merchants, physicians, and apothecaries to explore the reactions of various groups in the city and beyond. Her documentation is rich, culled from the holdings of numerous archives and libraries. She records the bills for the medicines dispensed by the apothecaries and the debates between various economic interests hoping to keep the city open for trade; she even consults published and manuscript pamphlets and treatises about the plague and how to treat the sick. Most of the primary information comes from the municipal archive in Seville, with its detailed records of the meetings and debates of the city council, as well as the commissions established to deal with specific threats to health.

The unifying theme, emphasized in chapter titles, is what Bowers calls “balancing”; “negiotiating” might be just as apt a term. Within that framework, she examines the various ways by which ideas were articulated to maintain social order in a critical period, discussing growth and governance, competing disease concepts, the roles of the individual and the community in fostering public health, and the almost inevitable conflict between local (city) and central (crown) authorities. The result is a brief yet richly detailed and rewarding survey of medicine and the attempt to provide for public health in Spain’s largest city in the era of Philip II.