Damned Lungs: Plague and the Limits of Community in Early Modern England

Historians of early medicine face a perennial problem of the mismatch between modern and premodern disciplinary and classificatory terms and structures of thought. This is especially true of respiratory illness, whose dynamic history is more richly illuminated by legal, philosophical, and religious writing than more recognizably “medical” treatises of the period.

This lecture by Stephanie Shirilan, professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, demonstrates how cross-disciplinary sources may be used to generate new analyses for the history of medicine. Prof. Shirilan will show how they help me to trace a history of stigma surrounding respiratory illness to a conflation of breath and grace after the Reformation that renders respiratory ease a hallmark of social and economic status and labored breathing a sign of spiritual defect or despair. Conducting this research before, during, and since the Covid pandemic brought into focus the ways such stigma sharpened in response to plague. English writers attributed resilience and vulnerability to pestilence to spiritual, moral, and political determinants that raised important and enduring questions: What duties did communities owe to one another and to their members in times of pestilential threat? How were the boundaries of such communities and obligation defined? Prof. Shirilan will demonstrate how these questions arise out of a sampling of materials held by the NYAM that include but extend beyond conventional medical practica, featuring works of spiritual counsel, “salves” and preparations for sickness and death, plague orders and proclamations, special forms of prayer to be said in times of pestilence, and an unusually elaborate, unpublished Compendious Table of Pestilence that distills and visualizes the complexity of early modern spiritual/material plague theory across genres surveyed.

Learn more Register now