Organised by the Pustules project in collaboration with the Centre for Medical History and the CCEH, University of Exeter

The Pustules, Palaeogenetics and Pandemics Project (https://ccehexeter.org/pustules-palaeogenetics-and-pandemics-2/)and the Centre for Medical History (https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/centres/medicalhistory/) are thrilled to welcome to the University of Exeter, Dr Thomas Banbury (https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/people/banbury) University of Cambridge, to give the seminar:

‘"As they say Hippocrates did among the Athenians": Uses of historical plague narratives in early modern medicine'

Wednesday 25th November 2026 at 14.30 GMT.

TITLE:

‘"As they say Hippocrates did among the Athenians": Uses of historical plague narratives in early modern medicine'

ABSTRACT:

The Black Death first arrived in Europe around 1347, beginning more than three hundred years of recurrent plague outbreaks that epidemiologists now call the Second Plague Pandemic. Medieval medical writers responded with a new genre of texts, the ‘plague tract’, which offered a mix of moral commentary, medical theory, preventative advice, and anti-plague therapies. The earliest generations of plague historians, such as Sudhoff and Klebs, compiled and edited hundred of these tracts with an emphasis on their intellectual contexts. Meanwhile, more recent scholarship (Lori Jones, Samuel Cohn, for example) has turned to the social, cultural, and material dimensions of the genre, including close attention to strategies for cultivating textual authority.

One way of instilling confidence and bolstering claims of medical authority was to draw on older narratives of epidemic diseases, such as the Plague of Athens in 430 BC and the second-century AD Antonine Plague. This seminar will explore how late medieval and early modern medical writers deployed accounts of these outbreaks, and the cures that supposedly ended them, to recommend anti-plague treatments and practices to their readers. I will focus on the practice known as the ‘rectification of the air’, so far understudied in the history of medicine, that attempted to alter the quality of the atmosphere in targeted ways, often through medicinal fumigation. Authors of plague texts including Thomas Moulton (c.1475), Thomas Phayer (c.1545), and Gilbert Skeyne (1568) described a range of ‘rectification’ techniques, drawing on a shared canon of historical examples to demonstrate the efficacy of the practice.

I trace how accounts of successful ‘rectifications’ by Hippocrates, Galen, Acron of Acragas, and the Egyptian priesthood, mostly drawn from Byzantine medical compilations, were retooled by these later authors. This allows us to analyse both the development of historicity as a strategy of medical authority and the transformation of ‘rectification’ practices in early modern plague medicine.

BIO:

Thomas Banbury is a historian of science and medicine. His work focuses on changing approaches to the atmosphere in medicine in medieval and early modern England. He holds a PhD from Cambridge's Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and has been a visiting fellow at the University of Oklahoma and the Royal College of Surgeons.

The event will be recorded and published on the Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC081fwCDU6Me_5zpU5xY7nA/videos?app=desktop&view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=0), so by attending you acknowledge you may be recorded.

Photo by François Fayet (https://unsplash.com/@francoisfayet?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/the-sun-is-setting-over-a-mountain-range-MEjLmCUYggQ?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)

If you have any questions, please contact: a.waterson@exeter.ac.uk

This event was funded in part by the Wellcome Trust [322103/Z/24/Z].

Description supplied by the event organiser.