Negotiating provisions, social assistance and health treatment : the elderly poor in the Ionian islands and Malta, 1800-1860s

Abstract

Andrea Vrindisi's facing of 'old age', provoked by an unexpected inability to work and anxiety of loosing his means of livelihood, was a common experience of the aging poor in pre-industrial societies. In such circumstances, disability usually meant changing one's life-long labour to a more adaptable or 'lighter' occupation. Actually, a corpus of historical works has already established that it was common for people to continue working up till they were capable to do so in European societies of the time. Elaborating on this body of research, the present study examines the compound strategies adopted by the aging poor in response to unanticipated changes in circumstances - due to disability and sickness or financial calamities - and to the more predictable vulnerability associated with advanced old age. Essentially, this helps to focus our analysis on the ways and means regularly employed by the elderly poor to secure provisions, social assistance, medical health and treatment available from the household and the neighbourhood as much as from intermediate organisations and formal state relief. When it comes to the household, some excellent historical studies have already shown the extensive role which it played as an immediate welfare net for assistance and care during long-term illness and old age. Most of these works also corroborate Pieter Spierenburg's sensible conception that '"a golden age' of unequivocal respect for the elderly in which children, relatives and the community in general rook care of their elderly 'as a matter of course' never existed" . While substantiating this authentic historical perspective, the present research work immediately sets the Ionian and Maltese elderly poor in specific household and community contexts in order to explore their daily efforts to procure provisions through multiple self help activities.