Not long after it struck Messina, the Black Death spread to the port of Marseilles in France and the port of Tunis in North Africa. Then it reached Rome and Florence, two cities at the center of an elaborate web of trade routes. By the middle of 1348, the Black Death had struck Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and London.

Those cities hit with the plague shrank, leading to a decrease in demand for goods and services and reduced productive capacity. As laborers became more scarce, they were able to demand higher wages. This had several major effects: Serfdom began to disappear as peasants had better opportunities to sell their labor.

The plague had large scale social and economic effects, many of which are recorded in the introduction of the Decameron. People abandoned their friends and family, fled cities, and shut themselves off from the world. Funeral rites became perfunctory or stopped altogether, and work ceased being done.

Bubonic plague causes fever, fatigue, shivering, vomiting, headaches, giddiness, intolerance to light, pain in the back and limbs, sleeplessness, apathy, and delirium. It also causes buboes: one or more of the lymph nodes become tender and swollen, usually in the groin or armpits.

The most popular theory of how the plague ended is through the implementation of quarantines. The uninfected would typically remain in their homes and only leave when it was necessary, while those who could afford to do so would leave the more densely populated areas and live in greater isolation.

The germs that cause plague actually do sometimes travel through the air, but good-smelling herbs don’t stop them. Many doctors still got sick by breathing through the nostril holes in their masks. However, it was largely the coat, gloves, boots, and hat that did so—not the bird mask.

Black Death—The Invention of Quarantine From the Swiss manuscript the Toggenburg Bible, 1411. The plague never really went away, and when it returned 800 years later, it killed with reckless abandon. The Black Death, which hit Europe in 1347, claimed an astonishing 200 million lives in just four years.

The Life of a Plague Doctor They probably were most common in southern European cities like Rome, Milan, and some might even have been active in the south of France.

Short answer: NO. We see in the media many people wondering if the plague doctors were evil or bad. This may be due to their terrifying masks and outfits, but they were doctors!

Nostradamus

The Plague Doctor carried a wooden stick so that he could drive people who came too close to him away.

Plague doctors wore a mask with a bird-like beak to protect them from being infected by deadly diseases such as the Black Death, which they believed was airborne.

The primary responsibilities of a plague doctor, or Medico della Peste, were not to cure or treat patients. Their duties were more administrative and laborious as they kept track of casualties of the Black Death, assisted in the occasional autopsy, or witnessed wills for the dead and dying.

DESIGNED TO COMBAT ‘POISONED AIR’ The beaked masks were filled with theriac, a mixture of more than 55 herbs and other compounds including ingredients such as cinnamon, myrrh, and honey. The shape of the beak was supposedly designed to give the air enough time to be cleansed by the herbs before it reached the nose.

The influenza pandemic of 1918–19, also called the Spanish flu, lasted between one and two years. The pandemic occurred in three waves, though not simultaneously around the globe.