Professor Evan Jones (Department of History) will be giving this fascinating seminar, which has been jointly sponsored by the School of Chemistry and the Centre for Health, Humanities, and Science.
Following the seminar, we will move to the coffee lounge for a food and drinks reception generously sponsored by all the School of Chemistry research themes, the Aerosol Science CDT, and the Centre for Health, Humanities, and Science. This reception will be a great opportunity to meet colleagues from different parts of the University, particularly the in the arts, social sciences, and medical sciences.
Title: 'Beating the Pandemic: Plague in Bristol in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries'
Time and Location: 3:00 pm in LT4, School of Chemistry, with reception following in School of Chemistry Coffee Lounge
Abstract: If you lived in early modern Bristol, or any other British city, there was a one-in-four chance that you would die of Plague. This represented an improvement on the previous two centuries. Yersinia Pestis accounted for more deaths than any other infectious agent in English towns. Yet Plague was, ultimately, eradicated in Britain. Bristol's last recorded epidemic was the Great Plague of 1665/6 - an outbreak most have never heard of because, unlike London, Bristol contained the epidemic. 'Only' 0.5 percent of city's population died. This paper will explore the impact of Plague in early modern Bristol, the city's evolving response and the extent to which policies and treatments may have affected transmission. These approaches included the increased use of 'pest houses' (Plague quarantine hospitals) on the edge of the city - one of which was located in 'The Little Park' on the site of what is now the School of Chemistry. The paper will also consider the various ways in which Plague may have been transmitted and it will argue that we need to think more creatively about how this occurred. Beliefs about how the Plague spread in pre-modern Europe are still shaped heavily by the experience of the third pandemic that developed in SE Asia from the late nineteenth century. But the environment of early modern English towns was very different to that of 1890s Hong Kong.
