1. Erich H. Loewy, "Duties, Fears and Physicians," Social Science and Medicine 12 (1986): 1363-1366; Abigail Zuger and Steven H. Miles, "Physicians, AIDS and Occupational Risk: Historic Traditions and Ethical Obligations," Journal of the American Medical Association 258 (1987): 1924-1928. [BACK]

2. Darrel W. Amundsen, "Medical Deontology and Pestilential Disease in the Late Middle Ages," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32 (1977): 403-421. [BACK]

3. Donald E. Konold, A History of American Medical Ethics , 1847-1912 (Madison: Madison State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1962). Unfortunately, how people perceived risks in different historical periods cannot be compared, except in dangerous speculation. The reasons for this difficulty are beyond the scope of this paper. In simplest terms, we do not know much about the history of terror and anger—or even pleasure. [BACK]

4. For example, John Duffy, Sword of Pestilence : The New Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966). [BACK]

5. Mary Catherine Welborn, "The Long Tradition: A Study in Fourteenth-Century Medical Deontology," in Legacies in Ethics and Medicine , ed. C. R. Burns (New York: Science History Publications, 1977), 204-217. Carlo M. Cipolla, Faith , Reason and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 13. Carlo M. Cipolla, "A Plague Doctor," in The Medieval City , ed. H. Miskimin, D. Herlihy, and A. L. Udovitch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 65-72. [BACK]

6. Katherine Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Cf. Richard Palmer, "Physicians and the State in Post-Medieval Italy," in The Town and State Physician in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment , ed. A. W. Russell (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 1981). [BACK]

7. Carlo M. Cipolla, Cristoforo and the Plague : A Study of Galileo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 25-26. [BACK]

8. Carlo M. Cipolla, Public Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 9. [BACK]

9. Cipolla, "A Plague Doctor"; cf. Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death : Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: Free Press, 1983), 125-126; cf. Walter George Bell, The Great Plague in London in 1665 (1924; London: Bodley Head, 1951), 85-86, 162, 286. Dr. Benjamin Freedman called to my attention an account of plague doctors in the seventeenth-century records of the Portuguese Congregation in Hamburg in I. Jakobovits, Jewish Medical Ethics (New York: Bloch, 1967), 108-109. [BACK]

10. Amundsen, "Medical Deontology," 411. [BACK]

11. Carlo M. Cipolla, Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 9-12. [BACK]

12. Walter George Bell, The Great Plague in London in 1665 ; for references to plague doctors see pp. 86, 162, 286. [BACK]

13. John Harvey Powell, Bring Out Your Dead : The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 , 2d ed. (New York: Arno Press, 1970), 148. [BACK]

14. Henry Tooley, History of the Yellow Fever as it Appeared in the City of Natchez in the Months of August , September and October , 1823 (Washington, Miss.: Andrew Marchall, 1823). [BACK]

15. John Stearns, "Concerning the Cholera Epidemic, 1832." New York Academy of Medicine, MS 169-171. For a full account of the epidemic, see Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years : The United States in 1832 , 1849 , and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). [BACK]

16. Samuel Smith Purple, "Manuscript Notes on Cholera in the United

States, 1849." New York Academy of Medicine. Dr. Purple saw no reason to note that the American Medical Association had recently adopted a code of ethics that obligated physicians to treat in time of pestilence. [BACK]

17. Duffy, Sword , 164-166. [BACK]

18. During the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919, most countries already had a cadre of plague doctors in military service; see Alfred W. Crosby, Epidemic and Peace , 1918 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976). [BACK]

19. Current Opinions of the Judicial Council of the American Medical Association (Chicago: AMA, 1981), IX. [BACK]

20. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 31. [BACK]

21. Privileged communication with the author. [BACK]