The year is 1656. Your body is gripped by violent cold. Your head is pounding, your muscles are too weak to sit up, and you feel like cracked, hard-boiled eggs are being squeezed from your neck and armpits.
In your feverish state, you see a strange man,
his face hidden by a beak-like mask, his body covered from head to foot. He examines you and without even seeing his face, you know the diagnosis: you have the plague.
The plague is one of the most terrifying and devastating diseases in human history. It spread across large parts of Afro-Eurasia in three separate epidemics beginning in the 6th, 14th, and 19th centuries. Killed tens of millions of people, and - in the best cases - had a survival rate of around 40%.
The European plague doctor,
with his beaked mask and wizard-like costume, is one of the images most associated with the plague today. He is often found in books and films about the 14th century epidemic known as the Black Death.
The only problem is that it's about as accurate as placing a modern surgeon at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles.
This confusion is understandable since the Black Death had several aftershocks, including a series of devastating outbreaks in Western Europe during the 17th century.
This is when the famous plague doctor really came on the scene. First described in the early 17th century, the costume included a hood with crystal eyepieces and a beak filled with a pungent combination of herbs and spices.
It may include cinnamon,
black pepper, turpentine, roast copper, and powdered viper meat. This recipe was inspired by the famous second-century Greco-Roman physician Galen, and was believed to treat the poisoned air known as mesma.
People believed that this foul air plague spread from swamps and sources of decay, such as dead plants or animal carcasses.
In the early centuries,
doctors across Europe carried metal pomanders filled with similar compounds, and it is possible that the beak evolved as a hands-free alternative.
The rest of the clothing, consisting of oiled leather clothing, boots, and gloves, functioned like an early hazmat suit, possibly designed to prevent miasma from entering through skin pores.
Although this showed some basic understanding that the plague spread from place to place, these doctors failed to realize that, in most cases, the real culprit was a small flea that carried the bacteria, Yersinia pestis, to a person or animal. used to transfer from one to another.
It is possible that the plague doctor's dress provided some unintentional protection from flea bites. However, there is not enough information to know whether robed physicians performed better than their plainclothes counterparts.
It is no wonder that this strange get-up has captured the popular imagination, despite the fact that its use was limited to a few places in Italy and France in the 17th and early 18th centuries.
Even then, he was looked upon with great fascination and at times ridiculed the inefficient and corrupt practices of some physicians. Until the 20th century, there was no effective cure for the plague, but that didn't stop doctors - clothed or not - from trying.
They consulted the works of earlier physicians for guidance,
did what they could to ward off the miasma, and prescribed a variety of recipes and antidotes. They also relied on pre-modern medical foundations.
These may include bloodletting, which involves the removal of blood (sometimes large amounts) in an attempt to remove toxins or restore the body's natural balance.
or the sangi, where the edge of a hot glass was placed over swollen lymph nodes in the hope that they would burst quickly—a sign, when it naturally did, that the plague patient was recovering.
Or—perhaps most painfully—cautery,
which involved lanced lymph nodes with a red-hot poker to drain the black pus. A lot has changed since his time.
Modern medicine has given us the means to quickly identify bacterial and viral threats and act effectively against them. We also have access to technologies like test kits, masks to prevent the spread of respiratory viruses, and vaccines.
And we do rigorous trials to make sure they're safe and effective.
But some things don't change: we still rely on the courage and compassion of medical professionals who voluntarily risk their lives against an invisible attacker to help and comfort those who It is most needed.
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