Pest Doctor - Unisex Grey Marl T-Shirt

To protect themselves from "miasma" – the unhealthy odor to which the spread of the plague was attributed – Italian and French doctors in the first half of the 17th century wore a beak-shaped mask, inside which aromatic herbs were placed, including sage, rosemary, and lavender. Even after the plague ended, the figure of the doctor dressed in this way remained an iconic element of our culture, especially in Venice: it was adopted at Carnival and by the theater in comedies and tragedies, and its name became semantically fused with many words in our Venetian language, even unexpected ones.

Mask of protection and icon of the Serenissima