Pest Doctor - Recycled Cotton Notebook, Blank Pages

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 beak-shaped masks, inside which aromatic herbs such as sage, rosemary, and lavender were placed. Even after the plague ended, the image of the doctor dressed in this way remained an iconic element of our culture, especially in Venice: it was adopted for the Carnival and by the theater in comedies and tragedies, and its name became semantically fused with many words in our Venetian language, even some unexpected ones.