маянанарсен

The Dance of Death

During the worst epidemics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, cities became total quarantine zones. Whenever the plague rolled in, rulers and wealthy citizens packed up and fled to the countryside. In the middle of all that abandonment and chaos, plague doctors and priests were pretty much the only authorities who actually stayed behind to face the horror on the streets, since the science of the time blended religion with medicine, both professions needed each other to manage the chaos of the infected cities, Doctors treated human bodies while clergymen treated the soul (since the plague was considered a divine punishment) so doctors rarely treated a patient if he had not confessed to a cleric beforehand bcs a cursed soul could not be cured

The Lazarillos and Pure Faith (14th Century)

In the original Black Death outbreak, their teamwork came from sheer desperation. Back then, doctors just wore regular cloth clothes (no bird masks yet ☹️ ....) and they worked side by side with priests in lazarillos (make-shift plague hospitals administered by religious orders, but the technical staff were plague doctors) and it was a total team effort:

While the doctor tried to stabilize the patient's body, the priest kept people from completely panicking, which was a huge deal because hysteria caused massive riots in the wards.

If they visited an infected house, they went in together. The doctor figured out if the patient had a fighting chance, and the priest stepped in right behind him to prepare the dying for the afterlife bcs they breathed the same infected air and handled the same fluid exposures, both professions caught the plague and died at insane rates, literally they were literally wiping out together......

Bureaucracy and the Bird Mask (17th Century)

Flash forward to 1619, and a French doctor named Charles de Lorme invents the famous leather suit with the beak-shaped bird mask 🙂‍↕️ and by this time the doctor and priest dynamic wasn't just about faith anymore... it was a highly regulated government control system

The doctor called the shots, Protected by his leather suit and beak mask, the doctor was the only one allowed to go in first. The priest had to wait outside at a safe distance until the doctor tapped the door with his wooden cane to give him the green light for last rites.

Shared paperwork, Since people were dropping dead in days, wills had to be written on the fly, the doctor (from a distance) certified that the dying person was still lucid, and the priest blessed the document, both had to sign together as official legal witnesses.

Counting the bodies, at the end of every day, the bird-masked doctor and the parish priest had to sit down and cross-reference their lists of the dead to make sure the government's body count was completely accurate.

I find it curious that Pantalone and Dottore are inspired by the two professions that irl helped each other in such a catastrophe

Pantalone's design evokes a high ranking Orthodox cleric with liturgical vestments and the Globus Cruciger constellation and its strong inspirations based on a real priest named Feofan Prokopovich, Dottore for his part, reinterprets the 17th century beaked mask and all his characterization linked to crows

aaaaa but it's not just that 👁️

The Clergy banks and economy

Although the Church declared greed a sin.... in the age of the plague, the clergy controlled the world's economy, Monasteries functioned as the first modern banks, lending to kings and insuring fortunes. When the plague struck, the fear of hell became a multimillion dollar financial business.... wealthy people paid fortunes in gold for "indulgences" (papers that bought their entry into heaven) furthermore, if a wealthy family died without heirs from the disease, the Church automatically inherited all their lands and palaces (lol rests in piss my granny she got hit by a-) while the people lay dying in the streets, the clergy accumulated capital and controlled the flow of money.

The Doctor alchemy and science

In those centuries, medicine was not separate from magic or alchemy, Plague doctors didn't know what caused the disease, so they experimented with the occult, searching for the "Elixir of Life" to become immune, their prescriptions were a bit...well hum.... they made the sick drink ground gold and used arsenic or mercury to try to "neutralize" the plague's poison, but the most disturbing thing was that, although the Church forbade opening corpses, considering it a horrific sin, these doctors secretly performed illegal autopsies in dark basements to study the anatomy of the dead.

In the end.... these two professions were two sides of the same coin........ Clergy controlled the economy while the Doctor controlled the bodies, ppl who perform religious functions suffered massive mortality during the Black Death (estimated at between 42% and 45%), this high death rate led to a severe shortage of priests and a crisis of faith that called into question the moral authority of the Church and forbidden science, churches and wealthy cities needed to pay these doctors fortunes so that the financial system wouldn't completely collapse due to a lack of workers and the Doctors were critical figures during the epidemics, most were junior physicians or young mens hired by cities to care for all citizens rich or poor, needed the clerical capital to finance their clandestine laboratories and potions, It was like a perfect and twisted alliance 🙂‍↕️ the economy provided the funds and science did the dirty work in the shadows.