The retreat of plague from central Europe, 1640-1720: A geomedical approach

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Volumn 74, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 1-28

  Eckert, Edward A ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; EPIDEMIC; EUROPE; HEALTH SURVEY; HISTORY; HUMAN; PERIODICITY; PLAGUE; SHIP; TRAVEL; WAR;

DISEASE OUTBREAKS; EUROPE; HISTORY, 16TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 17TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 18TH CENTURY; HUMANS; PERIODICITY; PLAGUE; POPULATION SURVEILLANCE; SHIPS; TRAVEL; WAR;

EID: 0034146484     PISSN: 00075140     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2000.0015     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Jean-Noël Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, 2 vols. (Paris: Mouton, 1975), 1: 105-11.
2. Edward A. Eckert, The Structure of Plagues and Pestilences in Early Modern Europe: Central Europe, 1560-1640 (Basel: Karger, 1996).
3. Thomas McKeown, The Modern Rise of Population (London: Edward Arnold, 1976).
4. Eckert, Structure of Plagues (n. 2), pp. 92, 98, 110, 127, 144, 153-54.
5. Roger Schofield, David Reher, and Alain Bideau, eds., The Decline of Mortality in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
6. Jesús Maiso Gonzalez, La peste aragonesa de 1648 a 1654 (Zaragoza: Estudios/82, Departamento de Historia Moderna, Universidad de Zaragoza, 1982).
7. Lorenzo Del Panta, Le epidemie nella storia demografica italiana, secoli XIV-XIX (Turin: Loescher, 1980).
8. e siecles," Annales ESC, 1969, pp. 1511-13.
9. Eckert, Structure of Plagues (n. 2), pp. 67-73.
10. Ibid., pp. 155-60.
11. Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).
12. Eckert, Structure of Plagues (n. 2), pp. 145-46.
13. Ibid., pp. 147-54.
14. Boundaries on the maps are present-day. The abbreviations used are Poland (POL), and former German lands now in Poland: Silesia (SIL), Pomerania (POM), and East Prussia (EP); Sweden (SWED), Denmark (DEN), Low Countries (Belgium and Netherlands, LC), Switzerland (SW), Slovakia (SLOV); in the Czech Republic, Bohemia (BOH) and Moravia (MOR); in Germany, Bavaria (BAV), Lower Saxony (LS), Saxony (SAX), Saxon Anhalt (SA), Brandenburg (BR), Mecklenburg (MECK), and Schleswig-Holstein (SH); in Austria (AUS), Styria (STY) and Carinthia (CAR); and Hungary (HUN).
15. Erich Keyser, ed., Deutsches Städtebuch: Handluch Städtischer Geschichte, 11 vols. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1949-74). This is a survey of German cities listing many mortality crises and populations.
16. Vaclav Schulz, Prispevsky k dejinam moru vzemich ceskych z let 1531-1746 (Prague: Nákl. Ceské Akademie Císare Frantíska Josefa pro Vedy, Slovesnot a Unemí, 1901). Detailed information on epidemics in this important area is limited. Its state of plague is extrapolated from data on Prague and a few other sites, and from more precise information in the border regions of surrounding lands.
17. Alfred Pickel, ed., Österreichische Städtebuch, 6 vols. (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie des Wissenschaft, 1968-). This is a survey of Austrian cities listing some mortality crises and populations.
18. Matthias Weber, "Die Pest in Raum Pfarrkirchen," Ostbairische Grenzmarken, 1974, 16: 115-20.
19. Most original sources of mortality data have been lost in a continuing process of destruction amplified during both world wars. Surviving parish or civil records of burials are not uniformly distributed, their concentrations varying markedly in different regions. In order to maximize the available quantitative data, three different categories of sources have been utilized. Burial data have been collected directly from the parish registers of some four hundred communities, most located in the southern half of Germany and in the west in the Rhine region. These data provide estimates of the normal yearly burial rate, the crisis mortality related to the epidemic, and the ratio between the two values as a measure of the intensity of the outbreak, as well as a characterization of the mortality crisis in terms of seasonality and the shape of the time-mortality curve, thus permitting verification of plague as the causal factor and indicating the variability of the crises in communities within the epidemic area. Irregularities inherent in these data are discussed more fully in Eckert, Structure of Plagues (n. 2), chap. 2. Less verifiable are quantitative data derived from later published articles and books. While nineteenth-century researchers provide a rich source of information about historic epidemics, the original parish or civil registers of the relevant communities have since disappeared. The data in the publications may have been derived from original registers or from vaguer estimates, as in historical chronicles of communities. Fortunately, in many (but not all) cases details expressed in the publications indicate that registers were the source of the data. Provided in such studies are estimates of population, burials in crisis years as compared to those in normal years, or tabular lists of yearly burials, but the precise data provided are variable in form and substance. These earlier publications are the basis for most of the quantitative data for the central part of northern Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. Another source of quantitative information was introduced for the later epidemics in eastern central Europe, notably Prussian and Austrian Habsburg lands: Prussian parish officers were required to send weekly lists of burials to the district governments, where mortality numbers were recorded and tabulated by civil servants, following which summaries were sent to central government bureaus. Since this system of weekly reporting made minimal demands on parish officers, with their varied levels of education and sense of orderliness, and since few weekly reports were missing, the data appear to be reliable. This is confirmed by the consistency of the scatter of yearly mortalities about the mean in normal times, while during epidemic periods the time-mortality curves conform closely to those of common plague epidemic curves. A similar system was employed in Austrian lands; however, most of this information, both the original weekly reports and the tabular summaries, has since disappeared. For both Prussian and Habsburg lands the data used here are derived from published tabulations for limited time periods, extracted from the original reports by scholars with an interest in crisis mortalities or population estimates.
20. Lars Walloe, "Pest og folketal, 1350-1750," Historisk Tidskrift, 1983, 117: 1-45.
21. Aksel Lassen, "The Population of Denmark in 1660," Scand. Econ. Hist. Rev., 1965, 13: 1-25.
22. B. M. Lersch, Geschichte der Volksseuchen (Berlin: S. Karger, 1896), pp. 304-5.
23. Wilhelm Sahm, Geschichte der Pest in Ostpreussen (Leipzig: Dunker and Humblot, 1905).
24. Jacques Charlier, La peste à Bruxelles de 1667 à 1669 et ses conséquences démographiques, Collection Historie, series 8, no. 20 (Brussels: Pro Civitate, 1964).
25. Hans Ulrich Papke, "Die Pest in Frankfort a.M." (medical diss., Frankfort am Main, 1947).
26. e siècle)," Actes du Colloque international de démographie historique 1965, pp. 379-407.
27. Edward A. Eckert, "Boundary Formation and Diffusion of Plague," Annales de démographie historique, 1978, pp. 51-80.
28. Verzeichnis der Getauften, Begrabenen, und Ehen in der Stadt und auf der Landschaft Basel von dem Jahre 1562 bis zum Jahre 1850, Basel University Library, Falk 1476.
29. Eckert, Structure of Plagues (n. 2), pp. 122, 141-42.
30. Paul Kläui, Geschichte der Gemeinde Uster (Uster: Gemeinderat, 1964), pp. 210-15.
31. Christian Rubi, Grindelwald in den Pestmonaten des Jahres 1669 (Grindehwald: Heimatvereinigung, 1969).
32. J. Muller, Der Aargau, 2 vols. (Aarau, 1870), 2: 94.
33. Emil Schultheiss and Louis Tardy, "Short History of Epidemics in Hungary until the Great Cholera Epidemic of 1831," Centaurus, 1966, 11: 279-301.
34. Ed. Jakobs, "Die Pest der Jahre 1680-83 in den Harzgegenden," Zeitschrift des Harz-Vereins für Geschichte und Altertumskunde, 1869, 2: 18-43.
35. Karls-Hans Arndt, "Die Pestepidemie von 1682-83 und ihre Auswirkungen auf Stadt und Universität Erfurt," Beitrage zur Geschichte der Medizin, 1975, 18: 27-89.
36. Leopold Senfelder, "Die niederösterreichische Sanitàtswesen und die Pest im XVI und XVII Jahrhundert," Blätter des Vereins für Landeskunde in Niederösterreich, 1899, n.s., 33: 34-80.
37. Manfred Straka, "Bevolkerungsverluste durch die Pest von 1680 in der Steiermark," in Festschrift Fritz Posch: Lebensraum der Grenze (Graz: Graz University, 1971), pp. 117-26.
38. Johann Christian Kundmann, Die Heimsuchung Gottes in Zorn und Gnade über das Herzogstum Schlesiens im Münzen (Leipzig, 1742), pp. 114-84.
39. O. T. Huit, Pesten in Sverige (Stockholm: Norsted, 1916), pp. 17-23, 59-69.
40. Wertner Moriz, "Die Pest in Ungarn, 1708-11," Deutsches Archiv fir Geschichte der Medicin und Medicinische Geographie, 1880, 3: 51-64.
41. Sahm, Geschichte der Pest (n. 23), pp. 35-119, 149-71.
42. Wilhelm Weitenweber, "Mitteilungen über die Pest zu Prag in den Jahren 1713-14," Vortragen in den historischen Section der königliche böhmische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaft, 1901, 26: 1-4.
43. Gottfried Lammert, "Letztes Auftreten der Bubonenpest in deutschen Donaugebiet während ihres Verheerungszug durch Europa von 1700-1716," Münchner medizinische Wochenschrift, 1888, 35: 220-21, 234-36.
44. Josef Pessrl, "Chronik und Topographie von Schwanendorf," Verhandlungen des historischen Vereines von Oberpfalz und Regensburg, 1866, 24: 163-586.
45. Margaret Felling, "Contagion / Germ Theory / Specificity," in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, 2 vols., ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 1: 309-34.
46. Ann G. Carmichael and Arthur M. Silverstein, "Smallpox in Europe before the Seventeenth Century: Virulent Killer or Benign Disease?" J. Hist. Med. All. Sci., 1987, 42: 147-68.
47. Andrew B. Appleby, "The Disappearance of Plague: A Continuing Puzzle," Econ. Hist. Rev., 1980, 33: 161-73.
48. Paul Slack, "The Disappearance of Plague: An Alternate View," ibid., 1981, 34: 469-76.
49. Kari Konkola, "More than a Coincidence? The Arrival of Arsenic and the Disappearance of Plague in Early Modern Europe," J. Hist. Med. All. Sci., 1992, 47: 186-209.
50. Gunther Rothenberg, "The Austrian Sanitary Cordon and the Control of the Bubonic Plague: 1710-1871," ibid., 1973, 28: 15-23.
51. Sahm, Geschichte der Pest (n. 23), pp. 45-53.
52. Slack, "Disappearance of Plague" (n. 48).
53. Friedrich Prinzing, Epidemics Resulting from Wars (Oxford: Clarendon, 1916).
54. Erwin H. Ackerknecht, History and Geography of the Most Important Diseases (New York: Hufner, 1965), pp. 22-32, 50-59.
55. Franz Schraud, Geschichte der Pest in Sirmien in den Jahren 1795 und 1796: Nebst einem Anhange, welcher die Geschichte der Pest in Ostgalizien, Vorschriften der Pestpolizei, und Ideen über die Austrotlang einiger ansteckenden Krankheiten enthält (Pest: Trattner, 1801).
56. John T. Alexander, Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).