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This is pre-victorian era , but still interesting about 'doctors' wearing masks during plage
You’ve seen them before: mysterious figures, clad from head to toe in oiled leather, wearing goggles and beaked masks. The plague doctor costume looks like a cross between a steampunk crow and the Grim Reaper, and has come to represent both the terrors of the Black Death and the foreignness of medieval medicine.
However, the beak mask costume first appeared much later than the middle ages, some three centuries after the Black Death first struck in the 1340s. There may have been a few doctors in the 17th and 18th centuries who wore the outfit, including the iconic beak mask, but most medieval and early modern physicians who studied and treated plague patients did not.
Why did plague doctors wear beak masks?
According to Michel Tibayrenc's book "Encyclopedia of Infectious Diseases" (John Wiley & Sons, 2007), the first mention of the famous plague doctor costume is found in a mid-17th century work written by Charles de Lorme, a royal physician in the service of King Louis XIII of France. De Lorme wrote that during a 1619 plague outbreak in Paris, he developed an outfit made entirely of Moroccan goat leather, including boots, breeches, a long coat, hat and gloves. Wearing this protective equipment suggests that doctors had grown more concerned about catching plague directly from their patients, rather than from the air itself.
The main feature of the outfit was a tight-fitting mask, complete with crystal eyepieces. This extended into a long beak, which was about half a foot (15 centimeters) long and filled with perfume or aromatic herbs. The beak was the most iconic feature of the outfit, and was thought to be essential for the doctor to prevent the inhalation of "pestilential miasma," or disease-ridden air coming directly from the patient.
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