Dr. Daniel R. Curtis from the History Department at Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC) was granted a new NWO XS project which focuses on those who were employed in infected houses during pre-industrial epidemics as paid cleaners and carers. Through this project, he hopes to learn from the past about how we deal with epidemics and to gain a better understanding of women’s work.
Who held the hand of a plague patient on their death bed? Who wiped their brow and comforted them in their fevered state? It is remarkable that we know so little about such basic acts of humanity.
Cleaners and carers performed a wide range of domestic tasks for those who were sick, their families, and after death, which included care, cleaning, fumigation, fetching food, medicine, and goods, witnessing testaments, installing locks, codifying and carrying corpses, and tending to children, animals, and crops. Despite their importance, we have little systematic study of these workers, who were often poor, marginalised, and frequently (though not always) women.
In the project, two sides are examined – the lives of these paid cleaners and their impact on the households in which they served. It makes use of underexploited original source material – especially guardianship accounts – and aims to quantitatively assess both the financial earnings possible for those working in the infected houses and the costs this service inflicted upon the household receiving this care.
It is hoped that this project will shift attention from focus on top-down state-driven public health responses and instead foreground local community-level practices during epidemics. It also will serve as a useful lens to better understand women's work during epidemics - up to now obscured from view in historical sources.
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See the full list of grant recipients is here.
