Pandemics, Governments and "Following the Science"

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Neil Murphy

This lecture will take place on campus, in 002, ground floor Business and Law Building, City Campus East (full address at the bottom of the page). The lecture will also be available to stream online - please register for the event and a link will be sent to you to access the live stream.

Pandemics, Governments and "Following the Science": Plague Control, Public Health and Absolutism in France, c.1470-c.1730.

Focusing on the enforcement of plague measures in early modern France,  Professor Murphy argues that centralised and authoritarian forms of government – such as the absolutist monarchy which emerged in seventeenth-century France – were more effective than local authorities in enforcing disease-control measures in large territorial states. Nonetheless, the anti—plague measures the Bourbon monarchs implemented rigorously on a national scale were initially devised as municipal initiatives during the Renaissance.

In the century after 1470, town governments worked in conjunction with physicians and other medical experts to establish a comprehensive system of plague care, the key elements of which remained in place right through until the disappearance of the disease in France in the eighteenth century. Indeed, interlocking systems of quarantine, contact tracing, health passports and the use of specialist hospitals, which were first devised in response to plague, remain the key methods used against epidemic disease today, including Covid-19.

Placing France in a broader context, this inaugural lecture will argue that the eradication of mass outbreaks of plague from Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a result of the stringent (and at times, draconian) enforcement of anti-plague measures.

 

About the Speaker

Neil Murphy is a Professor in History at Northumbria University. He is a historian of later medieval and early modern France, especially the period 1300 to 1600, as well as war and foreign relations during the reign of Henry VIII. He is the reviews editor of the journal Archives

 

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