Pest Doctor - Lemon Notebook, lined

To protect themselves from "miasma" – the unhealthy odor blamed for the spread of the plague – Italian and French doctors in the first half of the 17th century wore a beak-shaped mask, inside which aromatic herbs such as sage, rosemary, and lavender were placed. Even after the plague ended, the figure of the doctor dressed this way remained an iconic element of our culture, especially in Venice: it was revived at the Carnival and in theater comedies and tragedies, and its name merged semantically with many words in our Venetian dialect, some quite unexpectedly.

Mask of protection and icon of the Serenissima