ABSTRACT
Why do historians argue that the Renaissance marks the beginning of the modern era and what implications did this have on pharmacy and medicine?
The Great Plague claimed many victims and not all of them were people. The type of thinking and institutions that had dominated the Middle Ages failed to explain the utter devastation the plague had wrought and had failed to protect what proved to be a very vulnerable population. To be sure, for generations the plague continued to affect those who survived its wrath but the survivors began seeking new answers to the eternal questions about life and its meaning. Ironically, many sought answers by studying the wisdom of the ancient world with an eye toward applying the best of these ideas to their own time. They were looking back in order to move ahead. Over time, a series of subtle changes in values, attitudes, and technologies occurred that would eventually shape the modern world. For example, two remarkable men, the great Florentine poet Petrarch and the writer Giovanni Boccaccio, survived the devastation of the plague, and had already demonstrated in their writing a shift from the sacred or liturgical language of the medieval era to thinking and writing in secular terms. Boccaccio’s Decameron, a book that chronicles the devastation of the plague, remains one of the most incisive books about the plague and how it affected one town.1 The medieval values of piety, obedience, poverty, and humility were slowly giving way to modern values of money, pleasure, and power.
