As a child, I remember going to the Pink Palace Museum in Memphis, TN, and walking through the Civil War Medicine exhibit. It was gruesome to say the least. Dioramas of doctors sawing off limbs, diagrams explaining the use of leeches, a model pharmacy stocking all sorts of bizarre folk remedies— “creepy” doesn’t quite do it justice. The exhibit eventually worked its way toward more modern medicine, but the message of this one section was clear: there have been periods in medical history where guesswork led the way, where a visit from the doctor was a cause for fear rather than relief, and none more infamously so than the era of the bubonic plague.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the terrifying guise of the plague doctor popped up in popular fiction. Wearing long cloaks and their signature beaked masks, these characters loom nightmarish on the periphery of the medical arts. The doctors’ clothing fit the science of their day: every bit of skin covered to prevent exposure to the bubonic plague. (Of course, the plague was actually spread by fleas, but no one at the time realized this.) As for the beaks, they were filled with flowers and other strong aromatics like lavender and juniper and even vinegar— the thought being that these strong smells would keep the foul air of the plague at bay. While the plague doctors’ protective equipment may not have been as widely utilized as modern historical fiction would have us believe, the image grabbed our collective attentions. These goggled and beaked medical practitioners would be the last thing many plague sufferers saw, and thus, they acquired an association with death.
Zooming out a little, there’s something about the plague that stung the European psyche. The catastrophic mortality rates reminded survivors of the fragility of life, and the death imagery from this era hangs with European and North American culture to this day. There’s a popular misconception that the foreboding children’s song “Ring around the Roses” came from this time period, but it was actually a later invention by writers fascinated by the plague and its impact. The Grim Reaper also became a codified representation of death around this era, having appeared often in artwork from the time period. And whose visit would precede the Reaper’s? Why, the doctor’s of course.
Rather than a sign of hope, plague doctors symbolized despair and death. Though well-intentioned, they were the treatment of last resort, a sign that the patient was already too far gone. The fear of the plague doctor and its lasting presence in horror imagery reveals a fear of death itself and the futility of trying to keep it at bay. To look into that beaked face, which shows no emotion in return, is to face death. Even now, centuries later, the idea of the plague doctor as death’s harbinger hangs with us.
And that’s why plague doctors are scary.
Postscript: No Laughing Matter
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I saw several efforts to reframe the plague doctor image into something comedic or satirical (especially in political cartoons). In fact, one nurse friend of mine even sewed together a plague doctor mask to wear around the emergency department as a joke before numbers started rising and we realized what we were really facing. Laughing at death is hard, and so I imagine plague-related humor will remain pretty niche for quite a while yet. More than 4.5 million dead worldwide (as of this writing) just isn’t funny; I hope it never is. It’s terrifying and tragic, and I think we’re all going to be struggling to wrap our minds and hearts around this for a long time. In the meantime, as we think of the plague doctor trope and the terror of death it invites, my hope is that this negative association won’t pass over to the current wave of masked and goggled medical workers doing their best day in and day out to help us all. Be safe out there, friends.