This all seem humorous, but underlying these mad solutions is both desperation by the doctor to try anything to alleviate the suffering and death he is exposed to as part of his job, and to give some hope to his patients.ĭr Caim turns to the skies for cause and effect (hardly unusual, even today), blaming the appearance of Saturn and welcoming the appearance of a twinkling Venus as a good sign for bloodletting.

(The patient was at first overwhelmed by the sensation, but then wanted to experience the fun of it again). and above all, no cherries!”, a treacle made of viper and 53 other ingredients, and unleashing frogs so that they hop all over a patient’s body. Doctor Caim’s remedies include an ointment made of “honey, duck grease, turpentine, egg yolks and scorpion oil” (“Miraculous!” exclaims his patient), a coin of Queen Elizabeth I to be placed and held in the mouth, deprivation of “beer, no mutton loin, no cucumbers, no eels. Stuffed within the beak are roses, carnations, lemongrass and mint, “o filter evil smells and protect from infection”. He wears a beak mask, the functional uniform of plague doctors. The titular character meanders from town to town, dispensing cures. Mr Gallas is sorry for any impression he is capitalising upon the intense emotions of our pandemic. But the landscape is the same: death, and fear. Doctor Caim instead relies upon astrology and slugs. In our age, in contrast, we have a new common vocabulary once exclusively owned by medical scientists: “protein spikes”, “vaccine response”, and “endocytosis”. This comic concerns people dying in droves, the cause of the plague entirely misunderstood, and the cures completely bizarre to modern eyes. Gallas started to write this title well before the current global Covid-19 pandemic, and offers a form of apology to his readers in the introduction. What poignant thing is this? The Plague and Doctor Caim concerns a medieval doctor trying to save the lives of the infected during the time of the Black Death.

The plague doctor book