Dominique Baillargeon

Medical historian to explore relationship of plague to poverty

Notions of class have been rooted at least in part in physiology, says Kevin Siena.

An associate professor of history at Trent University, he will explore the contributions of medical literature to that process in his free public lecture, “Rotten Bodies: Plague, Fever, and the Plebeian Body in Early Modern England,” Friday, March 23, at 5 p.m. in the Oak Room, Vanier Hall.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plague and fever tracts commonly connected epidemics with poverty, Dr. Siena says.