Left: Heinrich vom Rhein zum Mohren, copy after Conrad Faber von Creuznach, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The early seventeenth century saw the emergence of a variety of costumes and equipment that were meant to offer protection against the plague, mirroring conceptions about contagion of their place and time. The physician is accompanied by two assistants with fumigating torches, the one on the right carries a container with a urinal flask – the visual inspection of someone’s urine being the second diagnostic method. His other hand he needed for taking the pulse of his patient, the most important diagnostical technique of that time. This meant to protect against the inhaling of the bad air that was generally considered the external cause of diseases, and it may also have softened the stench. As seen on this woodcut of a physician visiting a plague patient, they would carry a sponge or a piece of bread soaked in vinegar in one hand, holding it in front of the nose and mouth as often as possible. In the Middle Ages, doctors wore the clothes that were in accordance with their social status, even when they visited the plague-stricken.
