ABSTRACT
Dutch influence on urban planning, health care and poor relief The North Sea and Baltic regions of Europe, 1567-1720 Jonathan I.Israel It is arguable that by far the most important external influence on urban planning and improvements-and, as part of this, on health care and poor relief policies-in northern Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic, from the late sixteenth-down to the early eighteenth century, was that emanating from the Dutch cities. Throughout the northern zone the Dutch factor in the shaping of health care and poor relief vastly exceeded, indeed dwarfed, the impulses emanating from Britain, France or Catholic Southern Europe for more than a century. The object of this chapter is to explain why this should have been so and to attempt to set up a general framework setting out the timing and phases of this crucial impact and the forms which it took.
