Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Decameron

  • Boccaccio’s Decameron in the world of the coronavirus pandemic

    Mateja LekicPhoenix, Arizona, United States Giovanni Boccaccio wrote the Decameron after the carnage of the bubonic plague in the late 1340s.1 Caused by the highly virulent bacterium Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague, or Black Death, killed an estimated one quarter of the population of Europe and two-thirds of those living in Florence.2,3 What once occurred in…

  • Giovanni Boccaccio on pandemics past and present

    Constance MarkeyChicago, IL Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) is universally celebrated for his masterpiece The Decameron, an appealing assemblage of one hundred loosely connected novellas, all designed, in part, to distract the fourteenth-century Italian audience from the Black Death plaguing the country. Some of the tales are slapstick misadventures to make the reader laugh, others are more…

  • COVID-19 and the Black Death

    Colleen Donnelly Denver, Colorado, United States During the fourteenth century waves of the bubonic plague washed across Europe. Doomsday books of the age described an apocalypse that wiped out one-quarter to one-third of the population. Today, we are far better at tracking both the numbers of people impacted and the spread of disease, depending on the…