Why does the plague doctors portrayed in any movie or photos wore mask with beaks like a Crow?
In: Technology
There were two theories on how diseases worked in the middle ages.
The first was that disease was caused by evil spirits/demons. Ravens will scavenge dead bodies and if you have a lot of dead bodies in an area you will get a lot of ravens eating those bodies. You would also get a lot of rats and bugs – but rats and bugs were considered to be “evil” animals who remained unaffected by disease due to their affiliation with the evil spirits/demons.
Ravens were considered to be clean, “good” animals who *should* have been affected by disease if the evil spirit/demon theory was correct. The fact that ravens were able to eat plague bodies without being affected by plague led people to therefore conclude that something about ravens frightened the evil spirits/demons away.
The raven mask was an attempt to make the plague doctor look like a raven and therefore trick the evil spirits/demons – similar to how a scarecrow works.
The second disease theory was that diseases were caused by bad smells. That is, when you smelled something bad what you were smelling was the disease itself. This might sound kind of dumb but its very similar to them thinking that the disease was something like chlorine gas – chlorine has a very distinct smell and if you breath too much of it then you die. They thought diseases worked the same way.
The theory they had on this was that whatever was causing the bad smell could be neutralized by stuff that smelled good. So they would stuff the beaks of the masks with good smelling stuff in the belief that this would neutralize the bad smells involved with people dying, and therefore neutralize the disease itself.
They didn’t know which of those two theories was correct, and the plague doctor outfit that was worn at the time had the benefit of simultaneously protecting against both theorized causes of disease at the same time.
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