![]() ![]() Quarantine and isolation were the only practices that really did anything useful. They did so because they thought the chicken could draw the plague out of the victim (Mark 2020). The doctor continued this process until either the chicken or the patient died. When the chicken started to look sick, it was washed and strapped back on. You had to pluck the rear and back of a healthy, live chicken, and then strap its bare skin to the buboe of a sick person. There was also the Vicary Method, named after Thomas Vicary, an English doctor. The plague in Leiden in 1574: a doctor examines a urine flask surrounded by the ill, the dying and the dead, by Wellcome Images It was also this depiction that we recognise from the Carnival of Venice. Some people hated the costume because it showed that sick people were nearby. Paul Fürst turned this image into a piece of satire in the same year, called “Doctor Schnabel von Rom” (Doctor Beaky from Rome). A German engraver published an image of the plague doctor get-up in 1656. The outfit is first mentioned by a French royal physician, who donned the leather garb during a 1619 outbreak. This early PPE consisted of gloves, a hat, boots, a long coat, and breeches. These waxed leather overalls blocked the bodily fluids of those infected, helping to lower the risk of infection for the doctors. In actual fact, the plague doctors had better protection from their overalls. In theory, the wearer couldn’t get sick because he couldn’t breathe the bad air. Doctors stuffed sweet-smelling plants into the mask’s beak. This ‘bad air’ theory explains the famous ‘plague doctor’ mask from the Great Plague period. (Hence the Roman adoption of his son, Aesculapius, as their god of medicine during an outbreak). In ancient times, some credited the god Apollo as being the bringer of plagues. That could be God (or the Devil), astrology, or ‘bad air’. Before that, people blamed a variety of things for causing the plague. The plague bacteria wasn’t identified until 1894. This post will use ‘Black Death’ for anything relating to the earlier epidemic, and the plague for later outbreaks!īut let’s move on to our first plague figure that has moved into folklore…the plague doctor. ![]() We call the 1665 epidemic “the Great Plague”. So the Black Death refers to the specific 14th-century epidemic of plague. The translators chose the latter and the name stuck. He referred to it as ‘mors atra’, which could mean either ‘Terrible Death’ or ‘Black Death’. Simon de Covinus, the Flemish astrology, wrote about the plague in 1350. People assumed it did because the gangrene caused by plague turns body parts black.Įven though what we now call the Black Death sliced through Europe in the 14th century, the term ‘Black Death’ only appears in the 16th century. Yet Pooja Gupta points out that the term ‘Black Death’ did not initially refer to the physical symptoms of the plague (2020). Some use ‘Black Death’ and ‘plague’ interchangeably. ![]()
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