InsideHistoryDigital

Of all the images we have of the plague, that of the
plague doctor is perhaps the most familiar – and
certainly one of the most chilling. The sight of a
solitary figure wearing a beak-like mask, slowly
making its way from infected house to infected
house must have been a disturbing sight to witness
in the streets of any plague-ridden city or town.
Indeed, not only is the figure of the plague doctor
synonymous with the plague, it has become a
personification of death itself.
The French physician Charles de Lorme is credited
with inventing the familiar ‘beak doctor’ costume in
1619 or 1620, in order to minimise the risk of
contracting the dreaded disease himself. Lorme
had need of protection. As the personal physician
to the Medici family, he practiced medicine in
Florence, Milan and Naples, three of the worstaffected
cities in seventeenth-century Europe.
Lorme wrote of his outfit’s distinctive mask thus:
“nose half a foot long, shaped like a beak, filled with
perfume with only two holes, one on each side near
the nostrils, but that can suffice to breathe and to
carry along with the air one breathes the
impression of the drugs enclosed further along in
the beak.”
The drugs he refers to in the beak of the mask were
strong-smelling herbs, spices and dried flowers (the
posies referred to in the seemingly innocent
nursery rhyme) which supposedly prevented the
inhalation of miasma – the bad air which for
centuries was thought to be one of the key causes
of the plague.
For every high-profile plague doctor like Lorme
there were thousands of untrained and
inexperienced pseudo-physicians, known as
empirics, who valiantly tried in vain to ease the
suffering of their family, friends and neighbours
afflicted by one of the worst diseases in human
history. Many of them died while doing so. Lacking
even the most basic scientific knowledge and
understanding of the real cause, transmission and
spread of the plague, the methods plague doctors
used to treat their patients ranged from the
sensible to the ludicrous.
The first thing to do was to isolate the patient and
fumigate their house. There are numerous
accounts of whole families being locked in their
homes, the healthy with the sick, such was the
desperation to prevent the plague from spreading.
If the patient or their family could afford one, a