John Aberth - Doctoring the Black Death: Medieval Europes Medical Response to Plague

John Aberth is a historian of the Middle Ages who lives in Roxbury, Vermont. He received his PhD in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge in England and has published ten academic books. His latest books include The Black Death: A New History of the Great Mortality in Europe, 13471500, which came out with Oxford University Press in October 2020, and Doctoring the Black Death: Medieval Europes Medical Response to Plague, published with Rowman & Littlefield in June 2021. He has also published Plagues in World History and The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 13481350. A Brief History with Documents, now in its second edition. Currently he is writing a series of novels set during the Black Death. He has taught, both full- and part-time, at numerous universities and colleges, including the University of NebraskaOmaha, University of Vermont, Norwich University, Middlebury College, Skidmore College, and St. Michaels College. In his spare time, he rides horses and rehabilitates injured wildlife.

W RITING A FULLY COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY of the medieval medical response to the Black Death is a daunting task. The some-240 plague treatises that form the basis of this study were written in no less than nine languages: Latin, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French, English, Hebrew, and Arabic. As I cant pretend to know all these languages, I must here acknowledge the assistance of translators who generously donated their time and skills at reduced rates of pay to translate for me treatises in languages I cannot read: Russell Hopley for Arabic; Rabbi Nathan Bushwick for Hebrew; Thomas Huber for German and Dutch; and Stefano Mula of Middlebury College for Italian. All other translations are my own, and I take full responsibility for them. To paraphrase the Aragonese physician Blasius of Barcelona, if anything I have written be badly put, I pray, with no ill will, that anyone at all should correct it.

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