![]() Today, on the other hand, beak-masks serve the apparently widespread need to have an archetypical illustration - and to distinguish our "present" in its (supposed) superiority from an undefined, dark "before" when medicine is said to have been determined by superstition, magic and medical helplessness. Originally, the pamphlets with the motif of the beak doctor were circulated to emphasise the distinction between cities where they originated and the (supposedly worse functioning) southern European cities and their health administrations. The rhetoric of discrimination, demarcation and superiority of this propaganda is still at work today, albeit with a changed target. Thus they can also be understood as an instrument of political propaganda of the Upper German imperial cities: with constant repetition they transmitted a mental picture with very skewed statistics for 'typical'. These were cities in which freedom from plague became a sign of a 'functioning state' and a 'functioning' health system in the 18th century. The picture was heavily circulated with many versions probably originating predominantly from print shops in Nuremberg and Augsburg. Why was this picture gaining so much popularity? One reason is that early on people used this icon as a means to ridicule and look down on those using them. Further, a sponge with good smells is much easier to wear, doesn't impede breathing or vision so much. Other 'protections', like for eyes are less than secondary within that theoretical framework. The area of stereoscopic and sharp vision is blocked by the construction:Īlso note that 'the beak' was only intended to ward off the bad smells (miasma), by affixing nice smells in front of the nose without the need for one hand to hold them there, as that was common. Notice that the full-face beak-type has in pictures the eyes arranged in a way that is most impractical for a physician: if you cannot properly examine a patient, because you restrict your vision so severely: Marion Maria Ruisinger: "The “Plague Doctor’s Mask” in the German Museum for the History of Medicine, Ingolstadt", NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, volume 28, p235–252, 2020. We do not know, however, if they were produced as replicas for historic reasons or as fakes for the modern art market. And the specimens in Ingolstadt and Berlin? Both masks present details which suggest that they were not used as protective clothing at all. There is no proof at all of its use during plague outbreaks in Middle Europe. The conclusion: the beak mask is not mentioned before the mid-seventeenth century, and then only in Italy and Southern France. Its use for publications or exhibitions with a different temporal or regional reference must be rejected as historically unprovable. The figure of the plague doctor with the beak-like nose case has so far only been documented for the period after 1600 and even then only for the French and Italian regions. But its actual use was incredibly even more restricted in both time and space. ![]() This type of gear became iconic in representations all over Europe, later, not in the medieval times. With "Italy and France" you already have your answer, with the needed addition "at a few times, and in a few regions".
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