The structure of plagues and pestilences in early modern Europe. Central Europe, 1560–1640

Thomas Bartholin's De morbis biblicis, first published in 1672, proved an immediate success and went through four editions during the next twenty-five years. It contains no less than twenty-seven short chapters on diseases and "supernatural" events taken not only from the Old and New Testaments, but also from the Talmud. Bartholin's work is here made available for the first time in English in a thorough edition which includes a table of transliterations from Hebrew texts and, perhaps more significantly, a bio-bibliographical index, an important tool for unlocking the many references to contemporary scholars and texts. Bartholin was far from being a newcomer to biblical medicine when he published De morbis biblicis. He had already indicated his interest in biblical topics in his correspondence with his uncle Ole Worm during his residence in Padua in 1642-43 and three years later he published his tract on the abdominal wound of Christ. Between 1645 and 1653 he further documented this interest by publishing a number of works on paralytics in the New Testament. Systematic study of biblical medicine appears to have taken off at the beginning of the seventeenth century with the works of J Grossius, Compendium medicinae ex scriptura sacra depromptum, and G Arder, Enarrationes de aegrotis, et morbis in euangelico, both published in 1620. Unfortunately the introduction to this text offers no explanation as to why biblical medicine became a major concern in this period. Apart from stating that Bartholin was the "first physician of great distinction" to be interested in this topic, the editors make no attempt to explain how and where his work fits into this type of scholarship. We are told that Bartholin's approach to the diseases mentioned in the Bible was simple, namely that the Bible represents the truth and that therefore, from the symptoms described, physicians should be able to determine what type of disease was indicated, but not why Bartholin should have undertaken this enterprise. For a Lutheran natural philosopher and physician like Bartholin this interest appears to me to have been a way of fusing his search for God through his natural philosophy, and enquiries into the natural world, with his faith and the supernatural as presented in Scripture-an area where natural philosophy and theology could possibly unite in their common purpose to reach a better understanding of God and his creation.