Why Plague Doctors Wore Big Bird Masks

Looking at most depictions of the bubonic plague, you’re greeted by one iconic character: the plague doctor. Almost always, they’re clad in what is now an iconic if unfortunate accessory, the plague doctor’s mask. Looking a bit like something designed to bring an emu safely through to the other side of a nuclear holocaust, they’re not much like any other medical getup in history. In fact, at first glance, you’d more likely assume the bird people are the ones exterminating the population, not curing it.

At the same time, it doesn’t seem like doctors, of all people, would just start dressing spooky for spooky’s sake.

It turns out, though, that there is some function behind that avian-esque form, one that helped the doctors more than the patients. 

As the bubonic plague ripped through Europe, medicine was at a strange place where doctors were starting to understand that diseases might be spread through the air, but that’s about where the knowledge ended. They thought that “miasma,” basically diseased, foul air, was spreading the plague, which meant you had to fight disease with delightful scents. 

Medically sound? Not at all, but a pursuit that probably made the plague doctor’s job a bit more pleasant anyways. Bursting buboes, after all, doesn’t present a particularly pleasant bouquet. Bile with notes of corpse and necrosis? A cologne even Nosferatu might find a bit much.

Those long beaks provided the perfume with which to fight the evil, sick air, and were filled with aromatics and fragrant herbs. A pointy pouch packed with potpourri to offset the overwhelming aroma of open lesions. Mixes like lavender, camphor, myrrh, mint and cloves. Which, funnily enough, means that those masks would also be genuinely functional at the weird sex parties they look like they belong to.