ABSTRACT
Three things spring to mind when examining the considerable output of research into poor relief and health care provison in early modern Europe which has appeared over the last twenty-five years. First, poor relief and poverty have preoccupied historians to the detriment of the related issue of health care provision. Thus medicine and health care have only been allowed the occasional guest appearance in the series of works on poor relief published in the wake of Natalie Zemon Davis’ seminal article, ‘Poor Relief, Humanism and Heresy’, first printed in 1968.1 Furthermore, as opposed to the considerable literature on the Mediterranean countries, separate works on health care provision and medicine have, apart from England, been lacking for Northern Europe, in particular the Baltic and North Sea region.2 Second, this geographical lacuna of research into medicine and health care provision in Northern, Protestant Europe, is matched by a corresponding near paucity of research into poverty and poor relief, as demonstrated by most of the recent case studies which have focused exclusively on Western and Central Europe.3
