From the late fourteenth to the seventeenth century, many Italian cities and towns responded to r... more From the late fourteenth to the seventeenth century, many Italian cities and towns responded to recurrent plague by keeping municipal death registers. Different in content and character from the most celebrated form of early modern mortality records, the London Bills of Mortality, Italian authorities named, rather than counted, persons who died. This municipal practice illustrates the invention of secular death investigation systems in an era of recurring plague. Milan's uniquely detailed civic death registers, 1452 to 1525, display the underlying forensic character of such record-keeping, rather than the public health context in which such records have long been understood. Diagnosing the cause and manner of death, the fundamental objective of forensic medical inquiries, exposed epistemological uncertainties that academic medicine largely avoided for the entirety of the early modern era. How could one be certain that a death was caused by a particular affliction? Our death investigation practices are now far more sophisticated, but in the current, tenacious SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we still struggle to measure and record the human costs of crisis mortality.
pp.209-236 (Chapter 10) in Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed, Ed. ... more pp.209-236 (Chapter 10) in Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed, Ed. Joëlle Rollo-Koster Publisher: Routledge, 2017
Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, 2019
Giovanni Catelano died in 1497, five hundred years ago. In medical circles he vs^as knovi^n vi^el... more Giovanni Catelano died in 1497, five hundred years ago. In medical circles he vs^as knovi^n vi^ell only in Milan, but there he was prominent enough that advisers could beg Duke Ludovico Sforza to pay a visit to him before he died.^Through his involvement in civic projects advanced by Ludovico's father, the great Renaissance warlord Francesco Sforza, Catelano allied his training in medicine with the interests of early^no^raltatr^M^TEeTiw'^p rimary~witness to CatelSo's dedication, and to the evidence of an important way that recurrent plague epidemics effected profound medical changes in urban Europe. Althdugh Catelano died just before the French disease offered further challenges to a stable Galenic view of disease, the evidence of this Milanese physician's diagnoses of causes of death illustrates that new diseases were already a troubling feature of the late fifteenth-century medical world. Moreover the casual but necessary process of assigning an official cause to deaths privileged anatomical localization with attention to either the body's surface or to the patient's story. Giovanni Catelano's name appears in 1452, linked to the first three cases of the earliest surviving register of the Milanese Necrologi? A fierce and costly plague was ending, but the death registers stalwartly recorded details of each new plague death. Catelano reported a newly infected household on Friday, 21 July: an 18-year-old woman named Caterina fell ill on 19 July, and now evidenced a pestiferous 'dragonzello' or Ijubo in her left groin. At the 'Locus Montanee' (a temporary pest house)^a 29-year-old woman died of a pestiferous dragonzello in the right groin, by Catelano's judgement on 17 July. Finally, this day he also reported that in the convent of St Euffemia, 50-year-old Lucia, wife of lord Alesio Aliprandi, died from 'anthrax' in the left hip, of the pestiferous kind, according to Catelano's judgement on 13 July. These earliest records do not always clarify the various dates involved, that is, the point at which Catelano actually made his inspection of the ill person, or the cadavernor if, in fact, he personally viewed the body rather than simply talked to one who had seen the deceased.
Plague has an enigmatic history as a zoonotic pathogen. This potentially devastating infectious d... more Plague has an enigmatic history as a zoonotic pathogen. This potentially devastating infectious disease will unexpectedly appear in human populations and disappear just as suddenly. As a result, a long-standing line of inquiry has been to estimate when and where plague appeared in the past. However, there have been significant disparities between phylogenetic studies of the causative bacterium, Yersinia pestis, regarding the timing and geographic origins of its reemergence. Here, we curate and contextualize an updated phylogeny of Y. pestis using 601 genome sequences sampled globally. We perform a detailed Bayesian evaluation of temporal signal in subsets of these data and demonstrate that a Y. pestis-wide molecular clock model is unstable. To resolve this, we devised a new approach in which each Y. pestis population was assessed independently. This enabled us to recover significant temporal signal in five populations, including the ancient pandemic lineages which we now estimate ma...
The ability to sequence genomes from ancient biological material has provided a rich source of in... more The ability to sequence genomes from ancient biological material has provided a rich source of information for evolutionary biology and engaged considerable public interest. Although most studies of ancient genomes have focused on vertebrates, particularly archaic humans, newer technologies allow the capture of microbial pathogens and microbiomes from ancient and historical human and non-human remains. This coming of age has been made possible by techniques that allow the preferential capture and amplification of discrete genomes from a background of predominantly host and environmental DNA. There are now near-complete ancient genome sequences for three pathogens of considerable historical interest-premodern bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis), smallpox (Variola virus) and cholera (Vibrio cholerae)-and for three equally important endemic human disease agents-Mycobacterium tuberculosis (tuberculosis), Mycobacterium leprae (leprosy) and Treponema pallidum pallidum (syphilis). Genomic data from these pathogens have extended earlier work by paleopathologists. There have been efforts to sequence the genomes of additional ancient pathogens, with the potential to broaden our understanding of the infectious disease burden common to past populations from the Bronze Age to the early 20 th century. In this review we describe the state-of-the-art of this rapidly developing field, highlight the contributions of ancient pathogen genomics to multidisciplinary endeavors and describe some of the limitations in resolving questions about the emergence and long-term evolution of pathogens.
On November 11–14 1993, Indiana University hosted a conference on the ‘History of Registration of... more On November 11–14 1993, Indiana University hosted a conference on the ‘History of Registration of Causes of Death’, with funding from the US National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The conference brought together historians of medicine and historically-oriented demographers and epidemiologists to discuss the origins of the recording of causes of death and the possible uses of these documents in demographic and epidemiological research. Demographers and epidemiologists would like to use long-run series of causes of death to examine the effects of social and economic conditions, the availability of health care, and specific risk factors on mortality. Many important questions (such as the effects of early health experiences on old-age morbidity and mortality) are best studied with data on changes over long periods of time. However, it is very difficult to construct a consistent series of deaths by cause over time because advances in...
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 1999
... 15 Classification had been an implicit concern of earlier medical education and theory, which... more ... 15 Classification had been an implicit concern of earlier medical education and theory, which was based ultimately upon the ancient Greco-Roman ... Alter & Carmichael : Introduction ... For historicaldemography, state registration of causes of death plays directly to current concerns. ...
The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, 1993
The Renaissance in European history was a time of political, intellectual, and cultural change th... more The Renaissance in European history was a time of political, intellectual, and cultural change that had its origins in Italy during the fourteenth century. Beginning roughly during the lifetime of the poet Francesco Petrarch, who died in 1374, literati began to look to classical Greece and Rome for models of human political behavior and stylistic models of discourse and artistic representation. This humanistic quest involved the energies of philosophers and artists throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeen centuries, as Renaissance ideas spread northward. Though narrowly conceived in scholarly and artistic circles, the Renaissance matured in urban settings. Because this time period coincides with technological innovations and the subsequent exploration and conquest of new worlds, we are inclined to associate the issue of Renaissance diseases with both the growth of cities and the age of European discovery. The period also frames the era of recurrent epidemics of bubonic plague in Europe. Population growth in Europe was steady during the central, or “High,” Middle Ages but did not lead to the growth of large metropolitan centers. Urbanization was earliest and most dramatic in the Mediterranean lands, where city cultures had also been the basis of ancient Roman hegemony. By the late thirteenth century, Florence and Venice, as successful commercial centers, had populations of more than 100,000. Rome, Milan, and Barcelona may have been equally large. Smaller urban areas of 50,000 to 80,000 individuals existed throughout northern Italy and Spain. These cities were roughly twice as large as the “urban” areas of England, including London.
From the late fourteenth to the seventeenth century, many Italian cities and towns responded to r... more From the late fourteenth to the seventeenth century, many Italian cities and towns responded to recurrent plague by keeping municipal death registers. Different in content and character from the most celebrated form of early modern mortality records, the London Bills of Mortality, Italian authorities named, rather than counted, persons who died. This municipal practice illustrates the invention of secular death investigation systems in an era of recurring plague. Milan's uniquely detailed civic death registers, 1452 to 1525, display the underlying forensic character of such record-keeping, rather than the public health context in which such records have long been understood. Diagnosing the cause and manner of death, the fundamental objective of forensic medical inquiries, exposed epistemological uncertainties that academic medicine largely avoided for the entirety of the early modern era. How could one be certain that a death was caused by a particular affliction? Our death investigation practices are now far more sophisticated, but in the current, tenacious SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we still struggle to measure and record the human costs of crisis mortality.
pp.209-236 (Chapter 10) in Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed, Ed. ... more pp.209-236 (Chapter 10) in Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed, Ed. Joëlle Rollo-Koster Publisher: Routledge, 2017
Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, 2019
Giovanni Catelano died in 1497, five hundred years ago. In medical circles he vs^as knovi^n vi^el... more Giovanni Catelano died in 1497, five hundred years ago. In medical circles he vs^as knovi^n vi^ell only in Milan, but there he was prominent enough that advisers could beg Duke Ludovico Sforza to pay a visit to him before he died.^Through his involvement in civic projects advanced by Ludovico's father, the great Renaissance warlord Francesco Sforza, Catelano allied his training in medicine with the interests of early^no^raltatr^M^TEeTiw'^p rimary~witness to CatelSo's dedication, and to the evidence of an important way that recurrent plague epidemics effected profound medical changes in urban Europe. Althdugh Catelano died just before the French disease offered further challenges to a stable Galenic view of disease, the evidence of this Milanese physician's diagnoses of causes of death illustrates that new diseases were already a troubling feature of the late fifteenth-century medical world. Moreover the casual but necessary process of assigning an official cause to deaths privileged anatomical localization with attention to either the body's surface or to the patient's story. Giovanni Catelano's name appears in 1452, linked to the first three cases of the earliest surviving register of the Milanese Necrologi? A fierce and costly plague was ending, but the death registers stalwartly recorded details of each new plague death. Catelano reported a newly infected household on Friday, 21 July: an 18-year-old woman named Caterina fell ill on 19 July, and now evidenced a pestiferous 'dragonzello' or Ijubo in her left groin. At the 'Locus Montanee' (a temporary pest house)^a 29-year-old woman died of a pestiferous dragonzello in the right groin, by Catelano's judgement on 17 July. Finally, this day he also reported that in the convent of St Euffemia, 50-year-old Lucia, wife of lord Alesio Aliprandi, died from 'anthrax' in the left hip, of the pestiferous kind, according to Catelano's judgement on 13 July. These earliest records do not always clarify the various dates involved, that is, the point at which Catelano actually made his inspection of the ill person, or the cadavernor if, in fact, he personally viewed the body rather than simply talked to one who had seen the deceased.
Plague has an enigmatic history as a zoonotic pathogen. This potentially devastating infectious d... more Plague has an enigmatic history as a zoonotic pathogen. This potentially devastating infectious disease will unexpectedly appear in human populations and disappear just as suddenly. As a result, a long-standing line of inquiry has been to estimate when and where plague appeared in the past. However, there have been significant disparities between phylogenetic studies of the causative bacterium, Yersinia pestis, regarding the timing and geographic origins of its reemergence. Here, we curate and contextualize an updated phylogeny of Y. pestis using 601 genome sequences sampled globally. We perform a detailed Bayesian evaluation of temporal signal in subsets of these data and demonstrate that a Y. pestis-wide molecular clock model is unstable. To resolve this, we devised a new approach in which each Y. pestis population was assessed independently. This enabled us to recover significant temporal signal in five populations, including the ancient pandemic lineages which we now estimate ma...
The ability to sequence genomes from ancient biological material has provided a rich source of in... more The ability to sequence genomes from ancient biological material has provided a rich source of information for evolutionary biology and engaged considerable public interest. Although most studies of ancient genomes have focused on vertebrates, particularly archaic humans, newer technologies allow the capture of microbial pathogens and microbiomes from ancient and historical human and non-human remains. This coming of age has been made possible by techniques that allow the preferential capture and amplification of discrete genomes from a background of predominantly host and environmental DNA. There are now near-complete ancient genome sequences for three pathogens of considerable historical interest-premodern bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis), smallpox (Variola virus) and cholera (Vibrio cholerae)-and for three equally important endemic human disease agents-Mycobacterium tuberculosis (tuberculosis), Mycobacterium leprae (leprosy) and Treponema pallidum pallidum (syphilis). Genomic data from these pathogens have extended earlier work by paleopathologists. There have been efforts to sequence the genomes of additional ancient pathogens, with the potential to broaden our understanding of the infectious disease burden common to past populations from the Bronze Age to the early 20 th century. In this review we describe the state-of-the-art of this rapidly developing field, highlight the contributions of ancient pathogen genomics to multidisciplinary endeavors and describe some of the limitations in resolving questions about the emergence and long-term evolution of pathogens.
On November 11–14 1993, Indiana University hosted a conference on the ‘History of Registration of... more On November 11–14 1993, Indiana University hosted a conference on the ‘History of Registration of Causes of Death’, with funding from the US National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The conference brought together historians of medicine and historically-oriented demographers and epidemiologists to discuss the origins of the recording of causes of death and the possible uses of these documents in demographic and epidemiological research. Demographers and epidemiologists would like to use long-run series of causes of death to examine the effects of social and economic conditions, the availability of health care, and specific risk factors on mortality. Many important questions (such as the effects of early health experiences on old-age morbidity and mortality) are best studied with data on changes over long periods of time. However, it is very difficult to construct a consistent series of deaths by cause over time because advances in...
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 1999
... 15 Classification had been an implicit concern of earlier medical education and theory, which... more ... 15 Classification had been an implicit concern of earlier medical education and theory, which was based ultimately upon the ancient Greco-Roman ... Alter & Carmichael : Introduction ... For historicaldemography, state registration of causes of death plays directly to current concerns. ...
The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, 1993
The Renaissance in European history was a time of political, intellectual, and cultural change th... more The Renaissance in European history was a time of political, intellectual, and cultural change that had its origins in Italy during the fourteenth century. Beginning roughly during the lifetime of the poet Francesco Petrarch, who died in 1374, literati began to look to classical Greece and Rome for models of human political behavior and stylistic models of discourse and artistic representation. This humanistic quest involved the energies of philosophers and artists throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeen centuries, as Renaissance ideas spread northward. Though narrowly conceived in scholarly and artistic circles, the Renaissance matured in urban settings. Because this time period coincides with technological innovations and the subsequent exploration and conquest of new worlds, we are inclined to associate the issue of Renaissance diseases with both the growth of cities and the age of European discovery. The period also frames the era of recurrent epidemics of bubonic plague in Europe. Population growth in Europe was steady during the central, or “High,” Middle Ages but did not lead to the growth of large metropolitan centers. Urbanization was earliest and most dramatic in the Mediterranean lands, where city cultures had also been the basis of ancient Roman hegemony. By the late thirteenth century, Florence and Venice, as successful commercial centers, had populations of more than 100,000. Rome, Milan, and Barcelona may have been equally large. Smaller urban areas of 50,000 to 80,000 individuals existed throughout northern Italy and Spain. These cities were roughly twice as large as the “urban” areas of England, including London.
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Papers by Ann Carmichael