DARK ARTS OF THE PLAGUE DOCTORS

You’ve seen him before: a mysterious figure, clad from head to toe in oiled Moroccan leather, wearing goggles and a beaked mask. He looks like a cross between a steampunk crow and the Grim Reaper. He’s usually called a ‘plague doctor’ and a quick search online will turn up thousands of examples. Some of these images and costumes claim to represent genuine historical artefacts, while many others are new creations for Halloween and roleplaying. Thanks to the popularity of this costume, it has come to represent for modern audiences both the terrors of the Black Death and the foreignness of medieval medicine.

But this sort of plague doctor did not appear until well after the Middle Ages, some three centuries after the Black Death first struck in the 1340s. There may have been a few doctors in the 17th and 18th centuries who wore this outfit, but most medieval and Early Modern physicians who studied and treated the plague did not. Nor was there a single class of physician in the later medieval and Early Modern periods, who could be represented by a single outfit. Plague prevention and care came from university-trained physicians, surgeons, barbers, apothecaries, midwives, herbalists, priests, miracle-workers and a range of charlatans.

Instead of relying on a single, special outfit, plague doctors instead employed a variety of therapeutic methods and environmental theories to protect themselves and their patients from the contagion of plague. Ideas about the cause and spread of the plague changed over the period of several centuries, as did the clothing worn by plague doctors and the methods they used to treat the disease. Even though these plague doctors, working long before the advent of germ theory and antibiotics, were unable to cure the plague, they deserve more credit than they usually receive for intelligently observing the spread and symptoms of plague and for giving people hope