Youth, the symbol of the future, is threatened by the presence of the plague doctor. On the left bottom corner, to make this point even more obvious, a group of young people are running away from the doctor. So, the visual element of the hourglass operates an inversion of meaning: the doctor is no longer protecting himself form death instead, he is bringing death to his patients. Plague doctors used the rod to determine if someone was dead and to indicate what kind of action had to be taken. Second, on top of the rod, there is a winged hourglass, a symbol of death. Columbina was a popular Commedia dell’Arte character and this “signature” situated the doctor in a Carnival-like context. In the first place, there is a title: “The Beak Doctor,” which is a first clue as to the satirical nature of the print, reinforced by the signature at the bottom, which reads “Columbina ad vivum delineavit” (Columbina drew from life). It is a mirror image of the Altzenabch’s print (as usual for copies), with the addition of significant details.
But the most significant proviso was that plague doctors surviving the epidemic obtained citizenship and the right to practice in the city.Īpparently similar, in fact strikingly different, is a slightly later print, most likely copied from the first, produced by another German engraver, Paul Fürst (fig.2). Since famine accompanied epidemics, this last clause was particularly important.
DID THE PLAGUE DOCTOR MASK WORK FREE
By accepting the risky position, they gambled on their future: the city granted them a good salary for up to two months after the end of the epidemic, often with a handsome advance, free furnished housing, and food provisions. Plague doctors were often unsuccessful medical practitioners working in the countryside. Why, then, would anyone accept to work as a plague doctor?įourteenth-century contractual agreements between doctors and city officials offer some answers. Everyone in the city would avoid the plague doctor, regarding him as potentially infectious. He had to leave his family, if he had one, and had no interaction with any other healthy human for the duration of the epidemic. These were the physici epidemici, or plague doctors.Ī plague doctor lived in isolation, except when he interacted with patients sick with the plague or suspected to be. In the Middle Ages, city officials resorted to lesser known physicians or surgeons, often from the countryside, hired especially to treat plague patients and to count and transport the dead. In this climate of terror caused by the plague, ordinary physicians avoided people suspected of carrying the disease. “….this tribulation had stricken such terror to the hearts of all, men and women alike, that brother forsook brother, uncle nephew and sister brother and oftentimes wife husband nay (what is yet more extraordinary and well nigh incredible) fathers and mothers refused to visit or tend their very children, as they had not been theirs.” (Decameron, First Day, Introdution) The 14th-century Italian novelist Giovanni Boccaccio, who lived during one such epidemic, vividly described to what extent the visitation of the plague could contaminate even the closest, most intimate human relationships:
:origin()/pre00/fc08/th/pre/i/2016/338/8/e/plague_doctor_mask_by_spiked_fox-daqjbjw.jpg "did the plague doctor mask work")
Sick individuals became emblems of death, isolated in plague stations or immured in their homes. When the signs of the plague made themselves visible on someone’s body, fear and terror rapidly spread through all ranks of society. In the pre-germ theory era, plague was understood as an infectious disease caused by miasmas (bad airs), and contagion was attributed to infected particles that traveled from the bodies of the sick to those of the healthy. Even the most intimate human relationships changed, often for the worse. When the plague struck, the world did not look the same.
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