The Causes of Death in Early Modern Milan

Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington IN

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION: The PI will prepare a book-length analysis of causes of death in Renaissance-era Milan, 1450 to 1534. Milan's civic death registers uniquely (in this time period) provide diagnosis of cause of death for every individual over the age of two at death, permit rudimentary epidemiological analysis. It has been possible to code individual death reports, creating data fields for age, sex, date, cause(s), name of diagnostician, and (sometimes) length of time ill. The PI has already coded, entered, and cleaned the data within a relational database, comprising over 108,000 death records with up to 17 data fields. A number of discrete papers and articles have been published on these data. A book will unite the study and, importantly, place new analysis of plague deaths within the larger context of morbidity and mortality in a Renaissance city. Use of these records in historical epidemiology provides less speculative evidence than is commonly and widely accepted about this time period in medical and European history. The time period observed in this study includes at least five epidemics of plague; the early years of the "French pox" epidemic that classically has been attributed to the novel appearance of syphilis in Europe; the first decades of civilian casualties from gun warfare; and several other epidemics which can be clearly distinguished from plague in their epidemiological presentations. The importance of a book-length study is that these unique data can provide a better picture of the ways that plagues and pestilence were seen and diagnosed, within the more routine causes of death. The study of Milan's system of plague surveillance also provides new perspective on the origins and development of modern public health surveillance.