It’s officially Halloween season (though if you live in my house, it’s been fall since Labor Day, 100-degree weather be damned). I love this time of year, not only for the pumpkin spice (yes, I’m basic), but also because everywhere you look, there are decorations meant to invoke a spooky, scary vibe.

There are recurring characters in Halloween décor: skeletons, witches, Jack O’Lanterns, and ghosts are staples. Another one that keeps popping up wherever I wander is the plague doctor sporting a raven-like beaked mask.

Here are just some of the ones I’ve seen in the wild in the last two weeks:

Odds are good that you’ve seen them out and about as well. And I confess that I’ve been  intrigued by those plague masks for a while. Yes, a surge of articles about them came out during the height of the Covid pandemic (and, I’m not excited to note, the pneumonic plague has made the rounds in recent news coverage because of a reported outbreak in Russia), but they’ve been part of popular culture much longer than that. Centuries, even.

It all started in 1656.

While many cite the French physician Charles de Lorme as the first to describe the beaked mask we all know, his description of the gear he wore during a 1612 plague outbreak in Paris is more similar to a hazmat suit than the costume on sale at Spirit Halloween. The iconic beaked mask as we know it today first appeared in 1656. At that time, Italy had Black Death problem, and while this outbreak wasn’t as big as the outbreaks that came before and after, approximately 145,000 people in Rome and 300,000 people in Naples died.

The three engravings from that time are shown above. The first on the left was a woodcut made by an unknown artist in Rome. The inscription in Italian (according to Google translate) explains that “physicians in Rome” who treated those with “the contagious disease” wore outfits just like this that were made of “waxed cloth, a standard facing covering with crystal goggles, and a nosepiece filled with perfumes to ward off infection.”  The doctor is also holding a long rod, presumably to poke his patients from afar to reduce his chances of contracting the disease.

The other two images are based on this first engraving. The middle one is from Cologne, Germany, and comes from the printer Gerhard Altzenbach. This image is largely the same as the first, though I’d argue the “gloves” on the hands are more pronounced and the writing uses German, French, and Latin interchangeably.

The third, printed by Paulus Fürst in Nuremburg that same year, is a spoof of the images before it. The engraving has the title, “Doctor Schnabel von Rom,” (aka “Doctor Beak of Rome”), and the good doctor not only has more claw-like hands, but his rod is topped with bat wings and an hourglass (much like the passing of time, you can’t stop death). In the background, you see Doctor Beak chasing a flock of children with his rod raised high, acting more like a harbinger of doom than a medical professional (though, in plague times, the two can’t help but be intertwined).

The Doctor Beak image also has a satirical poem written in multiple languages, which includes lines like “He seeks cadavers to devour / like the raven on the dung heap.” You get the idea. (Recent research has also suggested that protestant city of Cologne is also using this as a dig against Catholic Rome; if that’s true, sick burn, Fürst.)

These three images appear to have spawned all the plague mask imagery that came after it, including the other well-known (and very similar) image included in a 1721 plague treatise by Jean-Jacques Manget, though the author was reportedly angry  that his publisher added this image to the treatise without his say-so.

It’s not clear how many doctors, if any, donned beaked plague masks during outbreaks. The German Historical Museum has an outfit in their collection that’s circa 1700, and is made from cotton velvet, canvas, and leather, with the eye lens made from selenite or gypsum.

But was his artifact was actually used for medicinal purposes? The museum’s mask is from Germany or Austria, and the 1656 satirical engraving came from Germany, which means it’s probable that this artifact was made after that engraving made the rounds. There’s also no known evidence I can find of the beaked gear turning up elsewhere when descriptions of treating the plague, so perhaps this suit was the first Plague Mask cosplay?

Whatever the case, it’s doubtful that the mask would have been that effective.

“The mask is not really going to do anything to really help prevent the spread of the plague unless it’s in a tiny percentage of cases where it’s pneumonic plague, which is a plague spread through respiratory air droplets,” explained Lydia Kang, a doctor and author of fiction and nonfiction, including Pseudoscience, which she cowrote with Nate Pederson.

Even in those cases where plague traveled via the air droplets rather than flea bites, however, the mask would only be helpful, Kang said, “to a small degree.” The biggest benefit she saw from the masks, where the beak was reportedly stuffed with nice-smelling herbs, would be to mask the smell of sick patients.

Kang also had thoughts on why the plague doctor has had such a long shelf life. “It's such a gross exaggeration of the human face. It’s actually quite striking, and it's a little frightening. It also looks a little bit like a crow, which in some cultures might be considered a harbinger of bad things, and so I think it just took on this mystique.”

One place they’ve become a mainstay are at Venice’s masquerade balls, where people dressed as plague doctors (aka Il Medico della Peste) have roamed the city for centuries. The masquerade version of the mask became a character in commedia dell’arte, a popular form of theater throughout Europe from the 16th century tp the 18th century.

Whatever the masks origins or actual use, beaked masks continue to pop up everywhere, even in my local Barnes & Noble, where I found an extremely huggable version of the plague doctor, though I’m still hesitant to give it a snuggle: