During the Bubonic Plague, doctors wore these bird-like masks to avoid becoming sick. They would fill the beaks with spices and...
zacharielaughingalonewithsalad:
During the Bubonic Plague, doctors wore these bird-like masks to avoid becoming sick. They would fill the beaks with spices and rose petals, so they wouldn’t have to smell the rotting bodies.
A theory during the Bubonic Plague was that the plague was caused by evil spirits. To scare the spirits away, the masks were intentionally designed to be creepy.
Mission fucking accomplished
Okay so I love this but it doesn’t cover the half of why the design is awesome and actually borders on making sense.
It wasn’t just that they didn’t want to smell the infected and dead, they thought it was crucial to protecting themselves. They had no way of knowing about what actually caused the plague, and so one of the other theories was that the smell of the infected all by itself was evil and could transmit the plague. So not only would they fill their masks with aromatic herbs and flowers, they would also burn fires in public areas, so that the smell of the smoke would “clear the air”. This all related to the miasma theory of contagion, which was one of the major theories out there until the 19th century. And it makes sense, in a way. Plague victims smelled awful, and there’s a general correlation between horrible septic smells and getting horribly sick if you’re around what causes them for too long.
You can see now that we’ve got two different theories as to what caused the plague that were worked into the design. That’s because the whole thing was an attempt by the doctors to cover as many bases as they could think of, and we’re still not done.
The glass eyepieces. They were either darkened or red, not something you generally want to have to contend with when examining patients. But the plague might be spread by eye contact via the evil eye, so best to ward that off too.
The illustration shows a doctor holding a stick. This was an examination tool, that helped the doctors keep some distance between themselves and the infected. They already had gloves on, but the extra level of separation was apparently deemed necessary. You could even take a pulse with it. Or keep people the fuck away from you, which was apparently a documented use.
Finally, the robe. It’s not just to look fancy, the cloth was waxed, as were all of the rest of their clothes. What’s one of the properties of wax? Water-based fluids aren’t absorbed by it. This was the closest you could get to a sterile, fully protecting garment back then. Because at least one person along the line was smart enough to think “Gee, I’d really rather not have the stuff coming out of those weeping sores anywhere on my person”.
So between all of these there’s a real sense that a lot of real thought was put into making sure the doctors were protected, even if they couldn’t exactly be sure from what. They worked with what information they had. And frankly, it’s a great design given what was available! You limit exposure to aspirated liquids, limit exposure to contaminated liquids already present, you limit contact with the infected. You also don’t give fleas any really good place to hop onto. That’s actually useful.
Beyond that, there were contracts the doctors would sign before they even got near a patient. They were to be under quarantine themselves, they wouldn’t treat patients without a custodian monitoring them and helping when something had to be physically contacted, and they would not treat non-plague patients for the duration. There was an actual system in place by the time the plague doctors really became a thing to make sure they didn’t infect anyone either.
These guys were the product of the scientific process at work, and the scientific process made a bitchin’ proto-hazmat suit. And containment protocols!
reblogging for the sweet history lesson
You know how malaria was defeated?
Well wait, you know what malaria is? It’s this mosquito-borne parasitic illness, you just get sick, and then you die. You know why swamps are considered places of death? Today we’re like “wetlands are critical verdant natural habitat, the kidneys of the world, and it’s important to protect them”. It’s because swamps had still enough water for egg-laying, so they were full of mosquitos, who were full of malaria, so if you hung around them you’d just fucking die.
What was the treatment? Well for thousands of years there wasn’t one. If enough generations of people lived in malarial areas they’d eventually be selected for resistance, because if they didn’t have it they’d die.
That’s why African-Americans have such high rates of sickle-cell anemia, because that comes from a recessive trait that codes for resistance, because they descend from slaves captured and exported from the wet western coast of Africa or inland along rivers, which meant mosquitos, which meant malaria.
They were imported from west Africa because the Caribbean and the Atlantic coasts of South America and the modern southern US were great climates for growing valuable cash crops that required intensive agricultural labor, but they were wet and malarial, and if you put a lot of people with ancestors from cool dry central-to-northern Europe there and had them work outside, especially in large groups, they would get malaria, and then they would die.
That’s why of all the places they “discovered” and colonized, the only places really thickly settled by Northern Europeans were Australia, South Africa, and the northern coasts of North America and southern coasts of South America, because they were drier temperate zones, or the mountainous/hilly highlands where it was cold and gravity made the rivers run fast, so they wouldn’t get malaria and die.
If you could kill the mosquitos that would help (that’s why DDT was invented and used in extermination campaigns everywhere), if you could drain the wetlands that would help (that’s why so many were destroyed, one of first things that set Rome off on the course to world-empire was draining the swamps around the city), eventually we finally developed drug treatments, the first one discovered was quinine.
You know how that was discovered? When Europeans were first establishing dominion in South America, a guy on the cold mountain highlands of the Pacific coast noticed the locals chewed this bark to keep from shivering. He was like “hmm, people with malaria shiver a lot, maybe this would treat malaria!” and it did!
It’s still not clear how quinine treats malaria, but it’s established that it has nothing to do with the mechanism by which it stops cold people from shivering. This was a complete fluke.
The father of the kid across the street that I played with when I was a kid ran a business. His business model was basically to comb through thousands of wild unsubstantiated claims of, basically, “alternative medicine”, which is what we call folk medicine as practiced by white people who live in subdivisions and watch TV. They’d try to find the few that might have potential, and then run them through initial tests, and taking the ones that showed some results and run them through further tests, in hopes of eventually finding something, most likely something that could be sold on to a pharmaceutical company who would have the resources to do further tests on the by this point maybe 20% chance it would do something and 5% chance it could be a profitable product.
His one big hit was Cold-Eeze. They were the Cold-Eeze guys. Someone was like “zinc is a miracle cure for my sickly child”, because, you know, resonant frequencies and homeopathy and chiropraxis (fuck “chiropractic”, that is not a well-formed noun). And so a ton of tests later, as far as they could tell zinc ions happened to be able to bind to the same sites on the nasal membrane where the cold virus would.
(except zinc tastes awful, and most of the flavorings you could use would bind to zinc salts in ways that they wouldn’t bind to those sites, but a particular patentable formulation - zinc gluconate glycine - would work without tasting like ass. And then as soon as the product got popular there were mass-market knockoffs that used other zinc formulations that didn’t do shit)
The problem with this business model, of course, was that most of the people pitching you ideas are either woo-woo quacks or snake oil sales/con-men, and thus if by random chance they hit on something that worked, you’d still be in business with woo-woo quacks or snake oil sales/con-men, who would take every opportunity to fuck everything up, but that’s another story.
