It is interesting to bring together some of the sanitary regulations of this period because it is often presumed that it is only in our time that public care of the health has come to be recognized as a duty of the civil authorities. Wickersheimer in his "Medicine and Physicians in France, at the Time of the Renaissance," [Footnote 41] has gathered a number of the details. It was forbidden butchers in Paris to keep meat for sale more than two days in winter or thirty-six hours in summer. Hotel keepers were not allowed to kill their own meat because, as [{406}] they could cook it before selling it, it was easy for them to "dissimulate bad meats." Restaurateurs were forbidden to serve meat which had been warmed over or warmed-over soup or vegetables. Fish was guarded particularly by detailed regulations and heavy fines were inflicted for its sale, except under conditions that must have assured its absolute freshness. Butter and fish could not be sold in the same shop. It was forbidden to put coloring matter in butter, no matter what the form of color material used, and also to mix old butter with new. The sellers of spices were required by Louis XII to watch over the absolute cleanness of their mustard mills and to employ as workmen only those who were clean and in good health. Similar regulations existed for the bakers. In a word, they anticipated in many ways the pure food laws of our time. Unfortunately these regulations were allowed to fall into abeyance during the neglect of social order that characterized the notable degeneration of the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries.
[Footnote 41: "La Médicine et Les Médecins en France à l'Époque de la Renaissance," Paris: Thesis 1905.]
Some of the popular hygiene of the time is very interesting and distinctly foreshadows practices of our own time. Erasmus gave directions to students for cleanliness. The hands were to be washed after each meal; a practice rendered necessary by the absence of forks and the nails were to be cut and cleaned every week. Gums and teeth were to be rubbed with a rough towel every day according to Montaigne, and various tooth powders were commonly employed. The feet and the hair ought to be washed at least once a week. Among foods, sea-fish were preferred to river fish and the livelier the fish the better it was liked. Shellfish were recommended by some and deprecated by others. Lobsters were usually counted difficult of digestion, and oysters and other shellfish shared in this prejudice. Popular traditions as to food were quite like our own. Peas were very much praised as an article of diet, spinach was considered to be good for torpid liver, water cress was said to have a favorable action on the bowels and lettuce as well as most of the material for green salads was declared to be sedative in action. Cucumbers were indigestible unless cooked, melons must be ripe and soft and without any spots in them or they were dangerous, and cabbage and onions were [{407}] praised or blamed as articles of food according to the particular part of the country from which one came.
Even in the matter of drinks opinions were not so different from those which are held at the present time, though there was just as much disagreement as regards their effects as we are accustomed to. In Normandy, where apples were common and cider a familiar drink, cider was considered to be much better for men than wine. In the middle and South of France, however, wine was considered of the greatest value for health, and white wine was considered to be diuretic while red wine was recommended for diarrheic conditions. Wine was declared to be much more wholesome as a drink than water and there is no doubt at all that in this our colleagues of that time were eminently justified by their observations. Any water in the neighborhood of cities or considerable centres of population was almost sure to be contaminated by sewage of some description and to be distinctly dangerous. Wine was ever so much less likely to be followed by disease than water. There were many who recognized how much of evil was done by the abuse of wine however, and Renou declared that in that century wine had killed many more people than the sword. He declared that the abuse of wine led to degenerations of the brain and the liver, disturbances of the nerves, brought on tremors, convulsions, even paralysis, and was active in the production of dyspnoea and other serious conditions.
Dr. Cramer calls attention [Footnote 42] to the fact that in 1481 the republic of Lucca in Italy elected three citizens to serve as a board of health. They were given plenary powers to act in case of epidemics. Their main purpose was to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. For this purpose they kept in touch with other countries, so as to be forewarned of places where epidemics were raging, and they had the right to forbid entrance into Lucca of persons, animals or goods until after a sufficient delay to insure the absence of infection or thorough disinfection. The word quarantine of course is very old, though often the idea is supposed to be new, and there seems no doubt that in most of the Italian cities health boards and health regulations anticipating many supposedly modern developments were in existence. There is even question of [{408}] the contagiousness of tuberculosis having been recognized at this time, and measures taken to prevent its spread. We know that scarcely more than a century after Columbus' period every principality in Italy has laws declaring tuberculosis contagious and regulating it.
[Footnote 42: Revue Médicale de la Suisse Romaine. 1914, XXIX, No. I.]
Sir Thomas More in his "Utopia" has a very curiously interesting paragraph with regard to the status of physicians in his ideal Republic, which shows what his own idea of the place of medicine in the world is. His long friendship with Linacre might very well have been expected to give him such a high estimation of the physician. It is all the more interesting because he expresses depreciation of his own profession of the law in "Utopia." What is striking in this passage is his recognition of the lofty place that medicine deserves to hold in the intellectual world as a department of philosophy and science. He emphasizes the fact that the less people need physicians the more they appreciate them, thus anticipating the modern idea that prevention rather than cure is the great basis for prestige in medical science. His fine tribute to the honor that medicine should have in the estimation of men will make his words a fitting close to this chapter on medicine in Columbus' Century.
"One of my companions, Thricius Apinatus, happened to carry with him some of Hippocrates' works and Galen's 'Microtechne,' which they hold in great estimation, for though there is no nation in the world that need physic so little as they do, yet there is not any that honors it so much; they reckon the knowledge of it one of the most pleasantest and profitable parts of philosophy, by which as they search into the secrets of nature, so they not only find this study highly agreeable, but think that such inquiries are very acceptable to the Author of nature; and imagine, that as He, like the inventors of curious engines amongst mankind, has exposed this great machine of the universe to the view of the only creatures capable of contemplating it, so an exact and curious observer, who admires His workmanship, is much more acceptable to Him than one of the herd, who, like a beast incapable of reason, looks on this glorious scene with the eyes of a dull and unconcerned spectator."