Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany

Claudia Stein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138253230
• eBook ISBN: 9781351915465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book explores the identity of the 'French disease' (alias the 'French pox' or 'Morbus Gallicus') in the German Imperial city of Augsburg between 1495 and 1630. Rejecting the imposition of modern conceptions of disease upon the past, it reveals how early modern medical theory facilitated enormous flexibility in defining disease, and how disease identification was a local matter, and one of constant negotiation and renegotiation. Drawing on a wealth of primary source material this work combines concern with the conceptualisation of the disease with its practical application, and argues for the inseparability of both. It focuses on how theoretical understanding of the pox shaped the various therapeutic reactions, and vice versa. It exemplifies this in the specific socio-cultural context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Augsburg, through an investigation of the city's municipal and private pox hospitals. Combining medical, religious, economic, municipal and institutional history this book offers a fascinating insight into how early modern society came to terms with disease both in a practical and theoretical sense. This revised English translation of Dr Stein's original German book adds new layers of understanding to a fascinating but complex subject.

Chapter 1
What was the French Pox?

Prima Causa: God

For sixteenth-century contemporaries, coping with illness involved coming to terms with one's Maker, the Lord and Creator of the universe. In only six days, Genesis told them, the Almighty created the world and gave to all things within it a specific meaning and purpose. Until man's Fall from Grace, all living beings in this carefree, heavenly paradise lived in harmonious togetherness. Humankind, made in God's image and thus the crown of His creation, enjoyed universal knowledge and was free from all physical suffering. But Eve's bite of the apple destroyed all this; not only was the right to stay in the Garden of Eden lost, but so too, through her disobedience, did the human body become an object of shame and subject to pain and disease, decay and mortality.¹

Thus for early modern Christians disease was a constant reminder of this Ursin that had tainted mankind forever and from which no one could ever hope to be redeemed. But disease was also understood as an immediate reaction of God, His divine punishment, flagitium Dei, with which He chastised the daily performed sins of mankind. No one regarded illness as something random or coincidental. In the context of divine will, disease always had a higher purpose. It was a sign from God, and it was man's duty to decipher and interpret its message.²

There was little need for debate among the authors under investigation here about the prima causa, the most fundamental reason for the outbreak of the new disease. That 'the primary and most common cause of these plagues derives from the will of God' was the unshakeable conviction not only of Joseph Grünpeck, but of all the other authors of the pox treatises.³ However, as to which particular sin had put the Almighty in the mood for this dreadful punishment opinions varied considerably. One cannot help wondering whether in fact each author advanced his own 'favourite sin', the one he considered most reprehensible, to the forefront of his debate. Thus, according to the Nuremberg barber-surgeon Franz Renner, God had brought the new plague down on humanity 'without doubt to punish the sins of fornication and excessive drunkenness'.⁴ Yet the Ansbach doctor. Tobias Knobloch, deemed drunkenness a lesser evil. For him it was the "shameful lust of mankind' which had compelled the Lord to resort to such drastic measures.⁵ The pox was merely the 'justa Dei vindicta. the just and rightful punishment of eternal Almighty God' for the most shameful of all imaginable sins. Since the creation of the world, Knobloch ranted, the carnal evil grew steadily and had reached such proportions among his own contemporaries that 'many wrongly consider it a virtue'. Joseph Grünpeck, by contrast, expressed the view that fornication, though significant, was only one of three cardinal sins to be avoided at all cost, reminding his readers that arrogance and greed were at least as reprehensible and therefore to be shunned just as vigorously.⁶

But as all my authors hastened to add. there was hope for mankind because the Almighty was as much a merciful God as a vengeful one. Just as He had inflicted the pox upon humans, it lay exclusively within His power to relieve them of it and allow their wretched bodies to heal. For this to happen, wrote Magnus Hundt, each sufferer must understand and accept that his or her illness was first and foremost 'God's punishment for disobedience' and a testing of individual faith.⁷ Not to accept one's own responsibility, or, even worse, to lose faith in God during the course of one's illness, could have potentially fatal consequences. After all, only the Almighty had the power to alleviate human affliction through His infinite Grace and Mercy. So as not to endanger recovery, Magnus Hundt thus advised that every pox sufferer was to make peace with God before beginning treatment. The Nuremberg barber-surgeon Franz Rentier also warned his readers against abandoning their faith, however much God might appear to be testing it. So as not to be plagued with such a disease for the duration of his or her entire life, each sufferer must 'acknowledge his sins, renounce evil, do penance and call upon the Lord as the supreme physician to grant him forgiveness and mercy'.⁸ Renner promised his readers that their faith would be rewarded because the Lord was 'so good, so gracious, so merciful that He shall not inflict greater suffering than he [the sufferer], with God's help and mercy, is able to bear'.⁹

A sure sign of this divine grace and mercy, these authors all agreed, was the arrival of a new miraculous drug from the New World, the wood guaiacum. Why else, they wondered, would it reach Europe at precisely the moment when it was most urgently needed? The anonymous author of A Clear Account expressed in writing what the others most probably believed as well, namely that

God, our Redeemer, comforted the lonely afflicted with a noteworthy medicine, previously hidden from the doctors, called Guaiacum wood, which the loving Father has sent from foreign lands. The effect of this wood, in the disease already cited and other diseases, is so miraculous that it can only be a special gift of God, who shall never abandon His children in their fears when they call on Him.¹⁰

The authors attached great importance to prayers and repentance as an indispensable precondition for the effectiveness of any treatment. However, they by no means intended to instil in their readers a stoic fatalism. The acceptance of illness as God's punishment, as a warning or as a test of faith was not to result in the sufferers rejecting all medical treatment as meaningless. From the earliest times Christianity had taught that God in His infinite mercy mitigated the punishment of the Fall and gave to mankind the means to alleviate illness through medication.¹¹

The duty of every Christian was thus to look after and maintain his or her body (as the home of the immortal soul) and to seek medical advice in the event of illness. Deliberately neglecting health and rejecting medical help was tantamount to wilfully shortening the life span allotted by God, an almost unsurpassable act of negligence that was equated with the sin of suicide.¹² That at least was how the Marbach physician Alexander Seitz expressed it in his reply to Abbess Elisabeth's request. She had asked him whether there was in fact any point in attempting to cure the pox, since it was generally recognised as God's rightful punishment for the sins of mankind. Seitz could not at all agree with this line of reasoning, not least because it called his entire profession into question. On no account, he assured the doubting abbess, should a patient 'suffering from this or any other serious illness rely entirely on healing powers of nature or God alone to cure him'.¹³ Drawing on both the Holy Scriptures and the opinions of a number of ancient medical authorities. Seitz explained that in the struggle with dangerous and venomous ailments the human body's natural inclination to survive should be accompanied and supported by 'permissible remedies'.¹⁴ It was deeply regrettable, he continued, that due to the Fall mankind had lost the knowledge of most of nature's secrets. However, God in His wisdom and goodness had granted physicians understanding of how to extract the secret healing powers hidden in stones and herbs once again to comfort and help their fellow men. Seitz even quoted the Bible to prove the extent to which the medical profession deserved particular honour and respect. 'We read in Ecclesiastes XXXVIII: Honour the physician, for God has created him from necessity'.¹⁵ Indeed, the Creator expected mankind to make full use of the cures He had provided for, as Seitz urgently reminded the abbess, everything that the 'planter of all virtue' had brought into being in the act of creation was there with a purpose. So those who. on falling ill, laid their hands in their laps and trusted blindly in divine grace were, in Seitz's view, acting against the will of God in rejecting His merciful gifts; indeed, they were wilfully harming themselves. In the event of their death they would be solely responsible and, as the abbess knew full well, Seitz reminded her, suicide was 'not a minor sin'.¹⁶

As for the physician, Seitz continued, it was both his duty and in his professional interest to offer his patients not just treatments but comforting words, and to sustain them in their faith, for it was generally acknowledged that 'medicine could cure if supported by faith'.¹⁷ Without spiritual encouragement, a patient's spirits could be all too 'frightened and depressed' and therefore not particularly receptive to the medicine's healing properties. Indeed, obviously drawing on his own experiences, Seitz warned that 'the patient often dies an unnatural death, as soon as he finds himself without encouragement'. The cures applied by the medical practitioner could only be properly effective if his patients were strengthened in their faith and their fears were calmed, for 'if a man has true faith his inner strength is unleashed, and turned eager to absorb the medicine'.

When Seitz published his treatise in 1509, the 'true faith' to which he referred was the one propagated by the Roman Catholic Church.¹⁸ However, only a few years later, due to the first challenges of the Reformation, the question of faith became the subject of intense and fierce public controversies all over the German-speaking lands.¹⁹ Some interesting aspects of the early debate can be gleaned from the treatise penned by the reform-minded knight and publicist Ulrich von Hutten.²⁰ In his account, On the Miraculous Medicine Called Guaiacum Wood, predominantly a gripping personal report of his own suffering from the pox, von Hutten also discusses the role and value of relics in the cure of disease, a widespread belief and practice strongly endorsed by the Catholic Church but increasingly criticised by the supporters of Protestant reform.²¹

Rome had never explicitly taught that saints could cure diseases but, despite that their relics were ascribed healing powers in the event of illness and played a significant intermediary role between the sick and God in Catholic religion.²² The specific benefits of relics were largely determined by the illnesses that this or that saint had allegedly endured in his or her lifetime. All sorts of 'special saints' existed for eye infections, sore throats, toothache, childlessness, paralysis and so on. Patron saints of the new French pox were those who were already believed to have successfully interceded for various kinds of illnesses manifesting themselves on the skin. Thus the Biblical Job, who suffered from skin rashes, was inundated with prayers and supplications, which is why one occasionally finds the pox referred to as the 'Disease of St Job'.²³ Another 'French pox-specialist' was St Rochus who. together with St Sebastian, was also frequently invoked in the event of plague. Specific geogra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Table
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations/Note on the Text
• Introduction
• 1 What was the French Pox?
• 2 Sickness and Poverty in Sixteenth-Century Augsburg
• 3 Negotiating the Pox
• 4 Treating the Pox
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index