InsideHistoryDigital

doctor would be summoned. It’s easy to forget the
seventeenth century was a world without free
healthcare.
One of the most common forms of treatment for the
plague was the ancient practice of ‘bleeding’ the patient,
which involved draining some of their supposedly badblood
from their veins or applying leeches to prescribed
parts of the body in order to rebalance the ‘four
humours’ in the patient’s body. Plague doctors might
also lance and drain the buboes, the infected blisters
around the lymph glands from which the term bubonic
plague is derived, which may have given some degree of
pain relief to the sufferer.
Other more bizarre
treatments for the
plague involved placing
or rubbing various
approved items – a frog,
I
a chicken (preferably
plucked) or a snake
(chopped up) on the
buboes.
If any or all of the above methods failed, and they almost
always did, the only thing left to do was to send for a
priest – who in many communities was often the ‘doctor’
anyway – to pray for the patient to have a painless death
and, in Catholic countries, salvation for their soul after
death.
Although as historians with the benefit of hindsight we
can look back at how the plague was treated with
derision or condemnation, we must keep in mind that
many plague doctors simply did what they thought was
best for their patients, during one of the most traumatic
events in European history.