THE HOUSE OF PLAGUE PATIENTS IN THE CITY OF LISBON: CONTRIBUTIONS TO ITS HISTORICAL, ARCHITECTURAL, AND URBAN STUDY

Since the end of the 15th century, an attempt was made to build a plague hospital in the city of Lisbon. The construction, initially provisional, had several designs, characteristics and locations. This paper seeks, based on municipal documentation, to reconstruct the process of institution and construction of the plague hospital in Lisbon, contributing to a little-known and systematized aspect of the history of public health in the city of Lisbon and of Portuguese hospital architecture. Likewise, it is intended to highlight this construction in the context of the development of the doctrine that understood the plague as a contagious disease and that based the elaboration of several regulations and legislation for the control of epidemic diseases in several cities in Europe, being one of the main measures the creation of plague hospitals and lazarettos.