Dressed for the Plague. No, Not This One.
Alexandra Vega calls her four pet leeches “the Squish Squad.” They eat once every six months; yes, they drink blood; and yes, she lets them feed on her body. They’re her friends! The leeches, named Chungus, Burrito, Wormitha, and Chocolate Chip, live in a fishbowl, but they’re curious about the world. “They each have their own personalities,” Vega, a 22-year-old biology student, told me. “Which a lot of people don’t expect from a leech.”
Leeches were a common medical treatment 400 years ago, which is why Vega owns them now. She’s part of a Tumblr community in which people dress up like 17th-century plague doctors and post and of themselves online. The plague doctors, the real ones, were amateur physicians who tried to help people suffering from the bubonic plague. They wore enormous, beak-like masks that were usually filled with herbs to prevent them from smelling” that caused disease. (They didn’t know about viruses.) In most images, they’re depicted wearing black robes and carrying sticks, which were used in part to keep the ill at least several feet away.
