Illness, Care and Public Health in Venetian Society

Under the Republic of Venice in present-day Italy, which ended in 1797, care for illness linked households to practitioners, parish charities, hospitals and health magistrates. The arrangements changed over time and across the city, mainland communities and Venetian posts abroad. A surgeon’s examination, a midwife’s license, a hospital salary or a burial permit each connected an individual case to a different part of that system.

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Physicians, surgeons and medical practice

Venetian patients could consult physicians, surgeons, barbers, midwives and other healers. Their roles were regulated by the health magistrates, the Provveditori alla Sanità, though the boundaries were not always clear in practice. In January 1546, the magistrates tried to specify the qualifications required to practice surgery. In theory, physicians alone could prescribe medicines, but officials sometimes overlooked this division. Giovanni Andrea dalla Croce, a surgeon known for treating skull wounds, described in his 1574 treatise the anatomical knowledge, manual skill and instrument design required for surgery.

Medical work also followed Venice’s commercial and political networks. Communities in Istria, the Adriatic peninsula shared mainly by Slovenia and Croatia, and Dalmatia on the eastern Adriatic, mostly in Croatia, hired salaried physicians, while doctors accompanied market galleys. Andrea Alpago, a physician from Belluno, worked for the Venetian consulate in Damascus in present-day Syria from 1487 to 1517. Such posts connected medical service to merchants and officials beyond the lagoon and mainland.

In 1642, the Republic’s health magistrates issued a decree barring Jewish physicians from treating Christian patients. Three Jewish doctors petitioned to continue. They cited earlier licenses, and two referred to their medical degrees from the University of Padua; Christian clients and parish priests supplied supporting statements. The magistrates allowed all three to keep practicing. In 1688, four Jewish physicians were permitted to work beyond the Ghetto, Venice’s enclosed Jewish quarter. These episodes show how professional qualification, religious identity and public need could meet in licensing decisions.

Midwives and the care of infants

Midwives assisted childbirth and cared for newborns. In the early seventeenth century, a physician and two experienced midwives examined an applicant before the health authorities issued a license. By 1689, the requirements included literacy and attendance at public anatomy demonstrations. Venice established a midwifery school in 1770, where trainee midwives were expected to attend twice each week. Midwives also reported births to parish priests and could perform emergency baptisms.

Their work appears in the records of deaths as well as births. Alexandra Bamji’s study finds that midwives attended 26 percent of those who died in 1796; 58 percent of the 1796 death-register entries naming a midwife concerned infants who were one month old or younger. A midwife’s role could therefore include labor, newborn care and contact with parish and health officials.

Household care and charitable institutions

Care could be arranged around the patient’s home. In 1608, the Fraterna dei Poveri in the parish of San Marcuola paid annual salaries to a physician and a surgeon, who had to treat sick and poor residents of the parish without charge. In the early eighteenth century, parish charities spread across the city and provided home relief. A bequest could also fund treatment: Antonio Gatto, parish priest of San Polo, endowed a physician and barber to care for the poor of his parish and four nearby parishes, including the cost of medicines prescribed by the doctor.

Bamji uses the Italian term medico for practitioners named in the death registers; it included people with degrees in medicine, surgery or both. Outside hospitals, the difference between high- and lower-status adult deaths with a medico recorded fell from 22 percentage points in 1645 to six in 1796. She suggests that parish home relief and other charitable provision helped widen access to medical care.

Venice’s large hospitals combined medical care with charitable and religious work. Gaetano da Thiene and two noblewomen, Maria Malipiero and Marina Grimani, first provided shelter to three poor women with syphilis, a sexually transmitted infection; this initiative developed into the Incurabili by 1522. That February, the health magistrates ordered beggars suffering from the disease to enter the hospital under threat of banishment. Medical assistance thus accompanied compulsory admission for a specified group of patients.

Hospitals differed in their assigned patients and daily work. The Incurabili treated venereal disease; the Mendicanti served poor and elderly people and also provided short-term treatment for scabies. Its infirmaries separated men and women, and a ten-bed room housed people described in the source as mentally ill. At SS. Pietro e Polo, one of Venice’s hospitals for soldiers, each new arrival was examined by a medico, and a physician’s order was required to change a convalescent patient’s diet. The four major charitable hospitals employed resident nurses and outside practitioners, including physicians. Religious orders administered hospitals, where prayer and the sacraments formed part of daily routines. In 1531, director Girolamo Miani added an orphan program at the Incurabili, with Christian instruction, literacy and artisan training.

Isolation and quarantine

The Senate established the Lazzaretto Vecchio in 1423 as an island hospital to isolate people with plague. In 1468 it ordered a second facility, the Lazzaretto Nuovo, on an island near the port. There, ships arriving from Mediterranean ports suspected of carrying disease were held in quarantine. Broad roofed cargo sheds called teze were used to sanitize merchandise, and additional buildings helped prevent crowding. The two islands separated people recognized as ill from arrivals held because of suspected exposure.

An anonymous 1752 account describes the later prescribed procedure for a suspected ship: officials questioned its captain ashore and compared his answers about route, crew and health with the bills of health and cargo manifest. After those checks, the ship was unloaded and its merchandise taken to the lazaretto. Merchant-appointed bastazi, the cargo handlers, opened and sorted the bales under a guardian’s supervision. For wool, they spread the fibers in heaps and moved and stirred them daily; silks and linens were handled twice a day and moved to another place each week. For goods from the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean, the forty-day period began on the day the goods were opened, and suspicious illness or death could extend it. Passenger quarters were kept apart from merchandise and from other quarantine groups.

Plague struck Venice in 1575–1577 and again in 1630–1631. During the latter outbreak, Jewish physician David Valenzo treated non-Jewish patients, a service he later cited when restrictions on Jewish doctors were challenged.

Health reports and burial permits

Public health depended on a reporting chain from parishes to the health magistracy. In 1460, the Republic decreed that three patricians should oversee public health on a continuing basis, but the provision remained inactive until January 1485 in Venetian dating, or 1486 in modern reckoning, when the magistracy became a stable office. In 1504, parish priests were ordered to identify sick people each day, record their illness and note whether a doctor had attended them. Each morning they reported findings, especially deaths, to the magistracy’s scribe, and a burial license was required before interment. From 1540 a priest could be fined for burying someone without notifying the office and obtaining permission.

Water quality also came under the Sanità’s supervision. An exceptionally high tide in October 1574 flooded wells with salt water and refuse. After a warning the following year, health officers had the cisterns cleaned; the work removed mud but could not clear all the salt that had seeped into the filtering sand. In 1576, Annibale Raimondo argued that contaminated well water had contributed to the epidemic. His explanation records how water quality entered plague debate, alongside the magistracy’s practical cleaning measures.

The reports became more detailed. In 1553, heads of convents, monasteries and hospitals also had to report deaths, giving the person’s name, age and the duration and nature of the illness. From 1563, a state physician had to examine people whose sudden death followed an illness of four days or less before the office issued a burial license. In 1731, physicians and surgeons who had attended a patient had to submit a signed statement about the illness. These entries were compiled into daily death registers, linking a patient’s last illness to the parish, practitioner and health officials.

Bamji’s sample shows a practitioner recorded as having attended 38 percent of the deceased in 1645 and 82 percent in 1796. The Jewish community’s leaders also had to report sickness and death in the Ghetto. In 1661, a Jewish witness described a communal death book that corresponded with the Sanità’s register.

Anatomy teaching at Padua

Venice’s medical practice drew on training at the nearby University of Padua in northern Italy, then part of the Republic’s mainland territories. In 1594, a professor commissioned a permanent anatomical theatre at Bo Palace, replacing temporary rooms used for dissection. The wooden theatre arranged stepped seating around a central table, allowing students to observe an anatomical demonstration.