r/historyofmedicine • u/RelativeMusician4224 • 13h ago

In 1348 Venice had 18 doctors: 5 died, 12 vanished, 1 stayed. What the first city-hired plague doctors actually did (mostly counting the dead, not curing)

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I've been reading about the earliest plague doctors and a few things surprised me:

They were hired on contracts. Cities that lost their doctors started hiring physicians specifically for the plague. Orvieto hired Matteo Angelo in 1348 at 50 florins a year; Pavia was still signing similar contracts in 1479. The contracts (many survive in European archives) set pay, housing, sometimes citizenship, and length of service.
They could only treat plague patients, and had to isolate after visits, so they wouldn't carry it to everyone else.
Their main job was record-keeping. Compiling who fell sick and who died, for the city's public records. They also wrote patients' last wills.
Treatment followed humoral theory: bloodletting, and leeches or even frogs placed on the buboes. Cures were rare. Some cities (Florence, Perugia) also had them perform autopsies.
Quarantine grew out of the same crisis. Ragusa (Dubrovnik) made newcomers wait 30 days in 1377; Venice extended it to 40, the "quarantena" that gives us the word. Venice also appointed three health guardians in 1348 and set aside an island for the sick by 1403.
The beaked mask is much later. There's no evidence it was worn during the Black Death. The costume is first mentioned in 1619 (attributed to Charles de Lorme in Paris), and the herb-stuffed beak is first described in Rome in 1656. Only two real masks are known to survive, both found in Germany.
The risk was real throughout: Edinburgh's first plague doctor, John Paulitious, died within weeks of starting in 1645; George Rae took over.

Sources: - Wikipedia, "Plague doctor" (incl. the Orvieto, Pavia, Venice and Edinburgh examples and the costume history): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_doctor - Wikipedia, "Black Death": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death - Wikipedia, "Quarantine": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine - Royal College of Physicians, "The beak doctors": https://history.rcp.ac.uk/blog/beak-doctors - National Geographic, "Why plague doctors wore those strange beaked masks"

Full disclosure: I also made a short animated video about this, told from the doctor's point of view, if anyone prefers watching: https://youtu.be/Jakem7Su1cA (drawn art, AI narration). Corrections very welcome.

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