Plague Doctors: Also known as Beak Doctors, Plague doctors served as public servants during times of epidemics starting with the Black Death of Europe in the fourteenth century (the Dark/Medieval ages). Their principal task, besides taking care of plague victims, was to record in public records the deaths of people due to the plague. They were not normally professionally trained or experienced physicians or surgeons, and often were second-rate doctors not able to otherwise run a successful medical business. They wore protective suits, which consisted of a heavy fabric overcoat that was waxed, a mask with glass eye openings and a beak like nose to hold scented substances, as they believed the nice smell could prevent them inhaling disease (but it didno t). Some also wielded sticks for poking people.
And ironically, most of them died from the Plague itself. So it proved very difficult to find an actual recorded Plague Doctor. However, with the help of the internets, I found this strange individual:

Giovanni de Ventura

He was a community Plague Doctor to the Italian city of Pavia. With actual training from university and a degree to prove it, he was a certified Plague Doctor, which was something rare back in ye olde times. Fresh out of school and eager to get his career going, he struck himself a handsome contract with the Italian city of Pavia. This remarkable contract included a salary of 360 florins per year (bearing in mind the average skilled person earned about 60 florins per year) plus full citizenship to the city and a FREE completely furnished house. The city valued him so much he couldno t even walk the streets without a bodyguard. So as you can tell, this guy was doing pretty well for himself. Although it was a luxurious life, his job forbidden him to converse with his patients, and he was expected to be a o man of few wordso . He had no recorded family, although there is indication he had living parents at the time he received the contract. There is no available information on when he was born or when he died, although we know he received the contract in 1479, so he was probably any age between 20 and 30 when he got the contract.


There are no known portraits or paintings of him either. From his job as a Plague Doctor though, you can typically expect from other sources that he looked like this:

http://webassets.scea.com/forums/20857_FOH10_PlagueDoctor.jpg


So I guess we will never know what the face of this unsung hero ever looked like, and perhaps it also shows that not all heroes of the medieval ages poked pointy swords into other men; some poked pointy sticks into filthy peasants. For ridiculous amounts of money.


My sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_de_Ventura#Professionalism