The Duty of a Faithful and Prudent Magistrate to Preserve and Deliver the Commonwealth from Contagion in Time of Pestilence, in Two Books

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Original title: De officio fidelis et prudentis magistratus tempore pestilentiae rempub. a contagio praeseruandi liberandique libri duo A two-book Latin treatise on plague and civic government by the salaried city physician (medicus ordinarius) of Bremen, dedicated to the consuls and senators of Bremen, Stade and Buxtehude. Rather than a bedside plague regimen, it is a work of municipal policy addressed to magistrates. A prefatory section on causes divides pestilence into three kinds — the immediately divine, the natural, and the contagious — reserving prayer, vows and expiation alone for the first while assigning the natural and contagious kinds to human counsel and hence to magisterial authority. Book I argues the magistrate's jurisdiction over public health by analogy with undisputed defensive expenditure on walls, ditches, ramparts and horses, and proposes a new branch of civic polity: a standing college of conservatores sanitatis modelled on the Venetian sanità, market regulation of foods, suppression of assemblies, fairs, schools, churches and baths, and sealed written health passes checked by instructed gatekeepers. Book II turns from prevention to remedy, treating the marking and enclosure of infected houses for six or seven weeks, purpose-built plague-houses (loemodochia) sited outside the walls on elevated, airy ground, bearers, buriers and cleansers, extramural cemeteries, the licensing of practitioners and exclusion of itinerant empirics and Paracelsists, fire as the chief public remedy, salaried city physicians sworn not to flee, and the controversy over flight. It incorporates whole administrative documents, including a plague mandate of the Landgrave of Hesse, quotes Luther's plague booklet of 1527, and closes with a penal schedule and a synopsis or recapitulation in statutory form, punishing contempt of medicine as heresy and the assertion that all plague is God's immediate stroke as blasphemy, followed by a verse prayer. 👉 Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here 📜 View the original source file This text was transcribed and translated as part of the ExLatinis project—an effort by Leo to make English translations of every published text in Latin in early modern Europe (between 1450 and 1750) available to the public for free online.

• Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here
• View the original source file

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