104
2022SPECIAL ISSUE
FOREWORD
More than a year and a half into the new coro-
navirus pandemic and the response to it, a sense of 
despair has taken hold of Slovenian society over the 
prolonged situation that prevents us from returning 
to the life as we previously knew it, with part of the 
population failing to understand the virus that causes 
COVID-19 and calling science into question. The 
challenges facing us are rejection of protective meas-
ures and dismally low vaccination rates.
Conversely, the pandemic presents researchers 
with a unique opportunity to weigh previous re-
search on the history of healthcare and epidemics 
in the light of their up-close, first-hand experience 
with the current health crisis. In other words, it pro-
vides an opportunity to generate an insight into how 
authorities and societies faced epidemics in the past 
by comparing measures, reactions to them, and post-
epidemic life. New research findings can give us a 
better understanding of the present situation.
The review Kronika has regularly featured top-
ics concerning the history of epidemics and health-
care. Special mention should be made of several 
prominent articles that discussed epidemics in his-
torical context over the past decades. Already in the 
1950s Majda Smole wrote about the plague in the 
sixteenth-century Carniola and Ema Umek about 
the plague in Styria between 1679 and 1683, in the 
1960s Olga Janša-Zorn published an article on the 
cholera epidemic in Carniola in 1855, and the 1970s 
saw the publication of Peter Vodopivec’s article on 
the smallpox epidemic in Carniola and Ljubljana in 
1873 and 1874.
This special issue of Kronika also aims to encour-
age the public to read and reflect on the history of 
epidemics and thus spread the knowledge to better 
cope with the ongoing pandemic. Collaboration with 
researchers who already addressed such topics in the 
past has delivered three new studies—two focusing 
on smallpox epidemics in the nineteenth-century 
Austrian Littoral and Carniola, and one investigat-
ing healing practices related to the plague epidemic 
in folklore. To further consolidate the knowledge by 
bringing it together in a single volume, the current 
issue of Kronika republishes three earlier articles on 
the topic at hand, that is, epidemics of contagious 
diseases in general as well as the epidemics of chol-
era and Spanish influenza, with each study discuss-
ing how authorities attempted to curb epidemics and 
how these were faced by the population. Motivated 
by the global relevance of the subject matter, we de-
cided to publish the contributions fully translated 
to English and thus share our findings with inter-
national experts and everyone potentially interested.
Barbara Šterbenc Svetina and Katarina Keber