In the Camp and on the March: Military Manuals as Sources for Studying Premodern Public Health
Guy Geltner
Historians tend to view public health as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, enabled by the emergence of representative democracies, centralised bureaucracies and advanced biomedicine. While social, urban religious historians have begun chipping away at entrenched dichotomy between pre/modernity that this implies, evidence for community prophylactics in earlier eras also emerges from group somewhat unexpected sources, namely military manuals. Texts composed (and often by) army leaders medieval Latin Europe, East Rome (Byzantium) other premodern civilisations reflect topicality population-level preventative healthcare well before nineteenth century, thereby broadening path historicising transregional even global perspective. Moreover, least throughout Mediterranean world, manuals attest enduring appeal Hippocratic Galenic how medical tradition continued centuries shape routines material culture vulnerable communities such armies.
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