History Thing 005 - Is There a Doctor in the House?
This is one doctor you really don't want in your house. The illustration above comes from 1661, is by Thomas Bartholin, and depicts a plague doctor. I don't know how everyone else feels, but in general I think they are the wearers of the most sinister uniforms in history, and they do tickle my sense of the macabre nicely.
The idea of a plague doctor dates right back to the fourteenth century, to the Black Death (that's the Black Death, you see? For absolutely no enlightenment on the subject at all, see the totally nonsensical movie called Black Death that not even Sean Bean could rescue from being a complete waste of an hour and a half or so).
There were good and bad points to being a plague doctor throughout the ages; in the beginning, for example, you could expect a nice, safe government job and to be paid about four times the going rate for a doctor despite the fact that you were deliberately chosen for your mediocrity at the profession. If you came along post-1619, you got a snazzy costume and mask impregnated with sweet-smelling substances to keep away the 'bad air' (at the time, the prevailing theory of disease was miasmatic, which is actually not as terrible as it sounds until you start assuming that covering up a bad smell protects you from it). You also got free autopsy privileges, which was something that would make your fellow physicians terribly jealous, since autopsies were rarely allowed at the time. Plus, you got a pointing stick to point at things.
However, you had about a 90% chance of dying of the plague, which I'm assured is an unpleasant way to go. In addition, you could be subject to quarantine if you wandered into a plagued area that was about to be cut off, which was kind of your job. So, pros and cons.
The uniform itself is actually a leather smock that extends from head to toe and apparently modelled after soldier's armour. I assume this is loosely modelled, because that is a terrible armour design. The mask was made of tooled leather or plaster, and later models had clear glass in the eye holes. In addition to the smock and mask, your leggings, gloves, boots and hat were all made of waxed leather, which I humbly note suggests that someone had some idea that Touching Infected People Is Bad.
Though apparently the doctors had no such idea, hence the dying despite having a pretty good approximation of a hazmat suit to protect them.
I shall leave you with the tale of two plague doctors from Barcelona who were, for reasons lost to history, kidnapped by a group of bandits on their travels (clearly not very bright bandits). So rare and valuable was a plague doctor at the time that when the bandits made an attempt to ransom them back to the state, it was paid in full with no questions asked. Probably because it's very difficult to actually force a doctor into that kind of work, so you had to hang on to the marginally qualified and sufficiently greedy ones when you found them.