Speaker
Description
On January 8, 1580, sixty-three-year-old jeweler Antonio Bondi, who had suffered from melancholy, threw himself down a well and died, as reported by the Provveditori e Sopraprovveditori alla Sanità (Superintendents and Supervisors of Health) of the Republic of Venice. Necrologies produced in the Veneto demonstrate that melancholic deaths took many forms, from cases such as Biondi’s to more mundane “melancholic humors” combined with fever to reports of melancholic pains following childbirth. By engaging with the narratives about people’s lives from records of their deaths, this paper investigates the treatment of patients suffering from the capacious category of melancholy through these medical mortality records, allowing for better understanding of the interrelationship between bodily and mental function in the early modern period. This study engages with melancholy, a disease which might impact a patient’s life for decades or as little as a few days, and the deadly disorders that sprung from it, such as cancer and rabies. Through the examination of necrologies created in the Veneto from 1550 to 1650, this paper studies how deaths related to melancholy demonstrate the tension between local conceptions of illness and responses to larger, pan-European developments in the implications of early modern humoral theory.
Short Biography
Jessica Hogbin is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Syracuse University, where she is studying the relationship between medicine, narratives around health, and politics in early modern Italy. Her dissertation, “Innumerable Melancholies: Medicine, Mental Health, and Human Nature in Renaissance Italy, 1450–1650,” considers melancholy as a means of comprehending Renaissance conceptions of human nature, the wider natural world, and scientific thought. Through an analysis of the connection between physical and mental health, her scholarship works to redefine the study of this now-debunked medical category, repositioning the discourse around melancholy to provide insight into the lived experience of unwell individuals, the people who treated them, and the culture which glorified aspects of their sickness.
| Keywords | Melancholy, medicine, mental health, necrology |
|---|---|
| jrhogbin@syr.edu | |
| Affiliation | History Department, Syracuse University |
| Position | Ph.D. Candidate |
