Plague house

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A plague house was used to care for plague sufferers at the time of the plague epidemics . Since the epidemic was considered incurable in the main period of these waves of illness, in the late Middle Ages and in the early modern period , and was therefore at best a relief from medical care, plague houses were primarily intended to isolate the sick from the healthy population. For this purpose, plague houses similar to leper colonies were mostly built outside or on the edge of a city. Another type of plague house should serve prevention, in the sense of a quarantine period . People in whose immediate vicinity the plague had occurred were brought to the plague house, which they were only allowed to leave if they were found not to be infected. An example of this is the Lindau Rainhaus .

Although relatively common in Europe in the Middle Ages, if not as widespread as leprosoria, only a few have survived in their original form to this day. However, insane asylums and hospitals emerged from many plague houses. The best-known examples of this include the Berlin Charité , founded in 1710 as a plague house, and the Paris Hôpital Saint-Louis , which served as a plague hospital from its opening in 1612 until 1772.

The Sebastian-Spital in Nuremberg , a foundation of Mayor Conrad Toppler in 1480, is considered the first plague house on German soil. Before that, quarantine stations had been set up outside of Germany, here is the establishment of an accommodation facility for plague sufferers on the island of Santa Maria di To name Nazaretto in the Venetian lagoon in 1403.

The term includes buildings specially built to deal with plague sufferers as well as converted hospitals and the like.

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Pesthospital in Vienna (1679)

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dieter Jetter: The European Hospital. From late antiquity to 1800. DuMont Buchverlag , Cologne 1986, ISBN 3770115600 .
  2. ↑ Hans Wilderotter, Katrin Achilles Syndram: The great dying. Epidemics make history. Accompanying an exhibition in the German Hygiene Museum 1995 ( extracts available online ).