Pari passu: Historiography and Science of the Plague in Portugal (1832-2021)

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira da Silva, André Filipe
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.23882/rmd.22095
• topic: Historiografia; História da Medicina; Peste; Peste Negra; Diálogo Multidisciplinar; Historiography; History of Medicine; Plague; Black Death; Multidisciplinary Dialogue

Historical research and historiographical production have always been strongly connected both with the past they study and with the present they are produced in. Inside this universe, History of Science offers valuable examples of parallel evolution of science in its most diverse dimensions and of the interpretation of its past.  Talking about the study of past epidemics, specifically, the relation between what is known about a disease in a certain moment and what is written about past occurrences of that disease is not just evident but cannot also be forgotten when the history of that historiography is written. The aim of this brief paper is to analyse the evolution of Portuguese historiography about medieval plague epidemics, especially Black Death, confronting it with the evolution of the scientific knowledge about that disease throughout the decades and determining how fast did Portuguese historians integrate that knowledge in their own historical analysis. From miasmatical theory until the definition of microbial theory of diseases, from the discovery of the plague bacillus (and little after, the vectorial transmission) to the confirmation of the identity of plague bacteria as the responsible for Black Death, all these discoveries influenced the way past plagues were studied and understood. Cultivating a symbiotic relationship since a long time ago, Natural and Life Sciences, at one side, and History, at the other, move forward together, establishing bridges that benefit both and allow the production of a scientific knowledge progressively more rigorous, transversal and useful.