Public Health in the Middle Ages Flashcards
All 12 cards in this deck
When did the Black Death reach England, and what were the two forms of the disease?
1348–49; bubonic plague (spread by fleas) and pneumonic plague (spread by coughing).
Give two causes people in 1348 believed were behind the Black Death.
A punishment from God, and miasma (bad air); also an unusual alignment of the planets.
Give one treatment people used against the Black Death.
Bleeding or lancing the buboes; also praying, or using herbal remedies to make the sufferer comfortable.
Give one way towns tried to prevent the spread of the Black Death.
Closing the town gates to keep outsiders out (e.g. Gloucester tried to keep out people from Bristol), or cleaning filth from the streets.
Roughly what proportion of England's population died in the Black Death (1348–49)?
About one-third.
Who were the flagellants during the Black Death?
People who whipped themselves in public to show God they were sorry for their sins, hoping He would end the plague.
How is the Black Death now thought to have been carried from country to country?
Most historians think rats on merchant ships carried infected fleas between ports; when a flea bit a person, the disease passed into their blood.
What made public health in medieval monasteries better than in towns?
Monasteries had planned sanitation — piped clean water, washrooms and latrines — and monks washed regularly.
What did medieval town governments do about dirty streets, and what was the problem?
They passed local (municipal) laws telling people to keep streets clean and remove rubbish, but the laws were not strictly enforced.
True or false? Medieval towns had sewers that carried waste away from houses.
False. Waste was tipped into the streets, cesspits and rivers, and there was no effective sewerage system.
Give one reason medieval towns were hard to keep clean.
Any one: towns grew faster than their water supply and waste disposal could cope with; the same river was used for drinking water and for dumping sewage and trade waste; no one knew about germs, so cleaning aimed only at bad smells.
Where did medieval towns get their water from?
Mostly wells, springs and rivers; a few towns built conduits or pipes of lead or wood to bring in clean spring water, such as London's Great Conduit in the thirteenth century.