A REALEZA E A SAÚDE PÚBLICA EM PORTUGAL (SÉCULOS XIV-XVI)

Abstract

Both modern and medieval societies have undergone frequent and varied cataclysms and epidemics. Of these, the plague was the first to claim a high number of victims, striking in various waves mainly in the second half of the fourteenth century. After the widespread epidemic of the Black Death in 1348, the disease took root in the West, occurring across endemic foci in different periods and regions up to the end of the sixteenth century. During this period, Portugal experienced at least one epidemic outbreak per decade on both a general and local scale, and daily life was tinged by the threat of death. If experts today still struggle to identify the underlying causes, what might be said of the populations affected? The latter also had their theories, and wasted no time in expressing not just hypotheses, but certainties they sought to disseminate. In this article we consider the interventions made by the Portuguese monarchy with the aim of overcoming the recurring waves of the plague, which, as guided by religious and medical understandings of the disease, sustained the image of the Curative King and gave rise to the first constitutional initiatives in the field of public health in Portugal. (English) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]