The public health movement is commonly (and incorrectly) characterized as a response to the ills of industrialization and modernization. Setting out to correct this misconception, this volume gathers sixteen studies on the deeper history and archaeology of public health from across the premodern globe.

Each chapter vividly reconstructs preventative ideas and practices in a different region, critically engaging with the paradigm of ‘healthscaping’, or designing environments where health can bloom. Studies range from programs to fight fire in later medieval England and restrict the movements of poor migrants in the Low Countries, to invoking gendered spirits in central America, maintaining water infrastructures in Cairo, and creating visual prophylactics in Tibet.

All of these programs had shortcomings and limitations, but tracing them collectively stresses two main points. First, there is a transregional justification for rejecting the concept of public health as a modern, industrial phenomenon embedded in Western biomedicine and beholden to centralised states and bureaucracies. Secondly, preventative biopolitics predate and transcend urban centers in Europe and can be documented for numerous civilizations in other world regions, as well as in the countryside, for both sedentary and mobile groups.

The volume accordingly illustrates that public health has a far richer history than a recent set of ideas and practices developed in response to the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, and that communities across the globe defined and pursued health in different ways, using the social, intellectual, legal, and physical tools at their disposal. This has important implications for all those interested in histories of health, medicine, and science in the medieval world, as well as for understandings of modern public health programs.

Contents

Contributor List

List of maps

List of figures and tables

Introduction: Premodern Bodies, Changing Environments, New Approaches – G. Geltner, Janna Coomans & Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

Healthscaping Public-Health History in Premodern China – Asaf Goldschmidt & Marta Hanson

Plague Prevention, Care, and Infrastructure in Valencia, 1450-1520 – Abigail Agresta

Agents of Communal Health in Iberian Jewish Communities, 1200-1500 – Carmen Caballero-Navas

Governmentality, Biopolitics and Medical Institutions in Flemish Cities, 1200-1550 – Lola Digard

Fire Prevention in Late Medieval British Towns and Cities – Carole Rawcliffe

Governing Water and Public Health in a Muslim City: Cairo in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century CE – Maaike van Berkel & Edmund Hayes

Dynamic Landscapes: The Archaeology of Prevention in Northwestern Europe (Seventh to Fourteenth Century) – Léa Hermenault

Preventative Healthcare among Miners in Europe, 1200-1550 – G. Geltner

Dangerous Flows: Public Health and the Itinerant Poor in the Urban and Rural Low Countries, 1400-1600 – Janna Coomans

Better Safe than Sorry: ‘Houses of Health’ and Ideologies of Care across the Bay of Bengal – Francesco Bianchini

They Who Have Stood as Women: The Nahua-Cihuateteoh Reciprocal Preventative Relationship in the Postclassic and Early Colonial Valley of Mexico – Edward Anthony Polanco

The Promises and Limitations of Islamicate Plague Treatises from the Eighth/Fourteenth-Fourteenth/Nineteenth Centuries – Justin Stearns

Pestilential Insects and Public Health in Europe, c. 1100-1600 – Claire Weeda

Ulema, Medicine, and Community in Yemen’s Long Fifteenth Century – Shireen Hamza

Buddhist Prophylactics in Visual Form: Bio-Politics and Public Health in Seventeenth Century Tibet – Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

Afterword: Where Next? – Peregrine Horden

Source: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/public-health-in-the-premodern-world-9780198969464