I’m rapid-publishing the first three Pepys Mysteries over the course of the next three months, in the hope of establishing the series, so they’re all written and ready to go. Thus, I can zip forward in time and post from Book 2: The Plague Doctor Murders (hence the purple frame and tiny cover!).

Isn’t the whole costume simply iconic? It’s still worn as a Hallowe’en costume to this day, yet the first mention of the plague doctor comes in Paris in 1619, in the biography of King Louis XIII’s physician, Charles de Lorme, who is credited with inventing the costume. My featured illustration dates from 1656, of Rome’s Doctor Schnabel von Rom, in a satirical publication that suggested Doctor Schnabel simply fleeced the dead and dying while terrifying people.

My point is that it wasn’t a great idea – it didn’t work (the herbs in end of the beak did nothing to protect the wearer) – and so it wasn’t around for terribly long. Yet it persists.

Which obviously makes a plague doctor the perfect villain, hence The Plague Doctor Murders.

I delved quite deeply into the plague of 1665 – which (fortunately) lingered into 1666, so I was able to feature a killer wearing plague doctor grab with a modicum of realism. The Great Plague, as it became known, killed 69,000 Londoners in 1665 alone – in a population of around 400,000.

Plague doctors were essentially useless, and need not even have trained as doctors (not that the training back then amounted to much). Primarily, they would perform bloodletting, which involved cutting the victim to release blood, which, I seem to recall “balanced the bodily humours” – I’m not even certain what that means, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t, either.

The plague was widely believed to be transmitted by bad air (miasma) – hence the herby beak – when we now know that it was transmitted by infected fleas moving from rats to humans. There were many symptoms, the most obvious one, since it was a bubonic plague, being the swollen bubos that appeared at a victim’s lymph nodes. Plague doctors were known to put frogs on those bubos, as a ‘cure’.

As an example of how desperate and clueless those tragic people were, here’s an excerpt from Medicina Flagelata or The Doctor Scarify’d from 1721, which includes “A Discovery of some Remarkable Errors in the late Writings on the PLAGUE, by Dr. Mead, Quincey, Bradley, &c. With some useful and necessary Rules to be observed in the Time of that Contagious Distemper.”

Nay, their Contest will not end in a Pipe of Tobacco, against which Dr. Hodges declares himself a profess’d Enemy: ‘But whether (says he) we regard the narcotick Quality of this American Henbane; or the poisonous Oil which exhales from it in Smoaking, or that prodigious Discharge of Spittle which it occasions, and which Nature wants for many other important Occasions, besides the Aptitude of the pestilential Poison to be taken down along with it; he chose rather to supply its Place with Sack.’

Dr. Bradley redeems it from this low Character, and represents it as a great Antidote in the last Plague Anno 1665. ‘The Distemper did not reach those who smoak’d Tobacco every Day, but particularly it was judged best to smoak in a Morning: He farther gives you an Account of a famous Physician, who in the pestilential Time took every Morning a Cordial to guard his Stomach, and after that a Pipe or two, before he went to visit his Patients; at the same time he had an Issue in his Arm, by which, when it begun to smart, he knew he had received some Infection (as he says) and then had recourse to his Cordial and his Pipe.’ By this Means only he preserved himself, as several others did at that Time by the same Method.

So there you have it: want rid of the plague? Smoke a pipe or two. Ideally in the morning.

Today’s rabbit-hole link concerns the heartbreaking tale of the Derbyshire village of Eyam, which I came across during my research.