"Evitar que o mal não padeça mais avante": O Regimento da Saúde de D. João III e a experiência italiana de saúde pública

Since remote times, the port of Lisbon was frequented by a large number of vessels and was a meeting place for sailors and merchants from different latitudes, which facilitated the entry into the city of pestiferous outbreaks and their spread throughout the kingdom. This fact would be a constant concern for successive Portuguese monarchs, and the city government needed to create measures to control and save the city from epidemics. The Health Regiment of D. João III, from 1526, was based on information collected from several cities in Italy by the judge Pedro Vaz and demonstrates the monarch’s concern to preserve the city and to act in case of plague, based on the measures followed by other cities and ports. The analysis of this normative document allows us to understand its scope in terms of the prevention and control of epidemic outbreaks. It is a document that defines procedures, but also defined a specialized administrative and functional structure as well as a penal framework. Likewise, by being modelled on the Italian experience, its drafting appears in a specific context of the natural evolution of the institutions created in that territory during the 15th century to deal with issues related to public health, as well as the evolution of medical theory on the plague.