Brotherhoods, poor relief, and healthcare

Abstract

In the early modern period, Europe was in the grip of poverty and undergoing profound change. Brotherhoods—associations that followed the principles of medieval guilds, trade corporations, and craft associations—played a key role in providing common people with health care and poor relief. Since their archives often tell their story over hundreds of years, brotherhoods can be an invaluable source of information about early modern medicine, its conventions, and its limitations. The misericórdia brotherhoods, founded in 1498, were the most important of their kind in Portugal; they still operate today, carrying out tasks that are not very different from the duties originally entrusted to them by the crown, such as running hospitals. Focusing on their archives, and looking, in particular, at normative documents (misericórdia statutes and hospital by-laws) and records of how these rules were implemented, this chapter poses several research questions about early modern medicine and poor relief and suggests how historians can analyze these primary sources.