The plague doctors are constantly winking at the fact that they don’t understand modern medicine, and that their crushes run away when they take out boxes of leeches, but they’re also ...

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.

Their iconic and ominous look, as depicted in this 1656 engraving of a Roman doctor, is recognizable to this day. The plague was once the most feared disease in the world, capable of wiping out ...

(Today, you might recognize it from the “plague doctor” costumes worn during the Carnival of Venice, as it’s associated with Il Medico della Peste, the famous commedia dell’arte character.) ...

I first glimpsed a plague doctor years ago, in a framed etching on the wall of a Venetian gift shop. The image was macabre: a sinister, masked figure draped in a dark robe. The head was covered ...

This is a 17th-century German or Austrian plague doctor mask, from the collection of the Deutches Historisches Museum. (Anagoria/GNU Free Documentation License) Since the onset of the pandemic ...