Marginals and Deviants - Medical outcasts

5 important questions on Marginals and Deviants - Medical outcasts

Who were the 'plague spreaders'? What happened to them?

  • In the towns of the western Alps, a number of so-called 'plague spreaders', primarily foreign women who were paid to clean the linen and to clear the houses of the diseased, were executed.
  • Motivated by greed, they were believed to have propagated infection through the use of a special grease.

What happened to people with a mental illness?

  • Those who we would now classify as suffering from mental illness or a neurological condition were kept hidden away by their families or left to fend for themselves as well as they could on the streets and highways of early modern Europe, alongside beggars, both able and disabled.
  • Epilepsy and depression (or 'melancholy') were associated with demonic possession and subsequently sufferers were subject to a variety of traumatic 'treatments'.
  • Lunacy, although similarly misdiagnosed, was nevertheless admissible as a defence in court.

How did people look towards deformed humans?

  • Fools and dwarfs continued to be a fashionable accessory at many European courts.
  • Monstrous births (of deformed humans or animals) attracted great interest and sometimes public display.
  • Disability and deformity were sources of both repulsion and fascination.
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What was the answer to God's creation of outcasts?

  • Meaning was sought in why God would have afflicted those who were supposedly made in his image in this way.
  • The sins of the afflicted, or of society more generally, provided the answer.

Where did monsters reside in the scientific community?

  • As scientific knowledge developed, so too did an interest in understanding as well as observing affliction.
  • Monsters existed in a liminal space between curiosity and prodigy, subject to 'the tolerance conferred by greater scientific understanding of a certain condition, and superstitious horror at that which does not conform to rigid roles of sex, race or species' 

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