CORPORA ET MORBI

Epidemics, contagion and public health in Rome

In 293 BC, an epidemic forced the Roman Senate to bring the sacred serpent of Asclepius to the Tiber Island: this is how the city's first healthcare facility came into being. From that gesture — half religious, half rational — this itinerary sets out, tracing in six stops two thousand years of the history of disease as a collective problem. From the island-lazaretto of the 1656 plague to the Sistine Wards of Santo Spirito, from the Ghetto where contagion is intertwined with social segregation to the Verano Cemetery founded in response to cholera, each stop tells how every epidemic produced not only deaths, but new institutions, new laws and new boundaries between healthy and diseased bodies. The question running through the entire route remains pressing today: at what cost — in terms of individual freedom and institutional control — is public health governed?