page_title: 1557 influenza pandemic
section_title: Sicily, Italian States, and the Holy Roman Empire
hierarchical_section_title: 1557 influenza pandemic / Europe / Sicily, Italian States, and the Holy Roman Empire
context_page_description: In 1557 a pandemic strain of influenza emerged in Asia, then spread to Africa, Europe, and eventually the Americas. This flu was highly infectious and presented with intense, occasionally lethal symptoms. Medical historians like Thomas Short, Lazare Rivière and Charles Creighton gathered descriptions of catarrhal fevers recognized as influenza by modern physicians attacking populations with the greatest intensity between 1557 and 1559. The 1557 flu saw governments, for possibly the first time, inviting physicians to instill bureaucratic organization into epidemic responses. It is also the first pandemic where influenza is pathologically linked to miscarriages, given its first English names, and is reliably recorded as having spread globally. Influenza caused higher burial rates, near-universal infection, and economic turmoil as it returned in repeated waves.
context_section_description: Influenza arrived in the Kingdom of Sicily in June at Palermo, whence it spread across the island. Church services, Sicilian social life, and the economy were disrupted as the flu sickened a large portion of the population. The Sicilian Senate asked a well-known Palermitan physician named Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia to help combat the epidemic in an advisory capacity, which he accepted. Ingrassia approached epidemic responses as a collaboration between healthcare and government officials, and was the first known "health care professional" to propose that a system for monitoring epidemics of contagious catarrhal fevers would aid in early detection and epidemic control.
  Flu spread quickly from Sicily into the Kingdom of Naples on the lower part of the Italian Peninsula, moving upward along the coastline. In Urbino, Venetian court poet Bernardo Tasso, his son Torquato, and the occupants of a monastery fell sick "from hand to hand" with influenza for four to five days. Though the epidemic left the entire city of Urbino ill, most individuals recovered without complications. By the time Bernardo had traveled to northern Italy on August 3 the disease had already spread into the rest of Europe. In Lombardy there was an outbreak of "suffocating catarrh" that could quickly become fatal. The symptoms were so severe that some members of the population suspected a mass poisoning had occurred.
  Padua, in the Holy Roman Empire, began to see cases in August, with sickness lasting into September. German medical historian Justus Hecker writes that the young population of Padua had been reeling from a dual outbreak of measles and smallpox since the spring when a new illness, featuring extreme cough and headache, began to afflict the citizens in late summer. The illness was referred to as Coqueluche. Switzerland was also reached by the disease in August. "Catarrh" swept through the Swiss plateaus from August to September and almost disrupted the graduate studies of Swiss physician Felix Plater, who was sickened by severe fits of coughing while a candidate for his doctorate.
caption: Influenza entered Sicily through Palermo's ports
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