Visiting travelers from elsewhere might be justified in thinking the plague doctor represented some strange, primitive religious custom: perhaps a monstrous-and mostly ineffective-exorcism ritual. Moreover, the plague doctor-as you can see from illustrations of this bizarre character-also carried with him a wand, “with which to issue instructions,” one scholar writes, “such as ordering disease-stricken houses filled with spiders or toads ‘to absorb the air’ and commanding the infected to inhale ‘bottled wind’ or take urine baths, purgatives, or stimulants.” The wand was also used to forcefully fend off patients. Meanwhile, the bubonic plague swept Europe, and plague doctors wandered towns and countryside in a “fanciful-looking costume typically consisted of a head-to-toe leather or wax-canvas garment,” writes the Public Domain Review, “large crystal glasses and a long snout or bird beak, containing aromatic spices (such as camphor, mint, cloves, and myrrh), dried flowers (such as roses or carnations), or a vinegar sponge.” Unable to make sense of alien languages and cultures, they mistook everything they saw. They took risks… They developed a mystique that became their identity.In the 17th and 18th centuries, what we know of as The Age of Enlightenment or early modernity, Europeans traversed the globe and returned to publish travel accounts that cast the natives they encountered as childlike beings, destitute savages, or literal monsters. They were often given special privileges to perform autopsies when it was forbidden for general doctors. They were innovators and non-conformists, they weren’t restricted by traditional laws of the time. Plague doctors didn’t care what other’s thought about them. There are so many parallels between serving the public as a Plague Doctor and brewing delicious beer as a Brewmaster. ![]() Different methods of balancing these humors were used to help people heal – such as blood letting with leaches, drinking ales so people had to urinate more… We obviously don’t take such a drastic approach and simply brew high-quality delicious beers to bring balance to your life.Ĭoincidentally, the art of brewing beer is very similar in that a lot of award winning recipes are found through experimentation and trying new things. True underdogs, they were regarded as ‘Empirics’ because they got their knowledge from practical experience and experimenting with new methods of treating patients… as opposed to laboratory research.Ĭommonly held medical theory of the time believed that an excess or deficiency of any of four distinct bodily fluids in a person - known as ‘humors’ - would directly influence their temperament and health each individual person was said to have their own unique humoral composition… The four humors are blood, bile, phlegm, and urine. ![]() They often worked in isolation as they were quarantined for 40 days before being able to rejoin the community.
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