Macabre History: The Black Death, the Great Plague, and the Doctors in Beaks

Dear Shadow Tribe, 

The Black Death and the Great Plague were not the same event, but were the same disease, commonly called the bubonic plague. The Black Death cut through Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East in the middle of the fourteenth century. The Great Plague usually means a later city epidemic of London in 1665. The beaked doctor people picture shows up in the seventeenth century, dressed for a theory of disease that will eventually prove wrong (miasma/dirty air).

The bacterium is Yersinia pestis, and it still exists. Rodents are the reservoir for the disease. Their fleas are the vector that carries the bacterium from host to host. Humans usually catch it from a flea bite. Left alone, the bubonic form settles in the lymph nodes and produces the swellings called buboes. It can move into the blood and into the lungs. Once in the lungs, pneumonic plague passes on the breath. 

The Black Death

The pandemic that would be called the Black Death began in Central Asia, reached the Black Sea and the Mediterranean around 1346–1347, and ran through Europe and the Mediterranean world, including Northern Africa, until about 1353. people at that time did not use the name. They said the pestilence, or the great mortality. “Black Death” is a later label for that specific wave.

The death toll is argued in the details and not in the scale. A third to three-fifths of Europe is the usual range. Tens of millions of people. Cities hired doctors at emergency rates because the ordinary ones fled or died. The city of Orvieto, in central Italy, contracted Matteo fu Angelo in 1348 at four times a normal fee. Pope Clement VI added doctors in Avignon. In Venice, of eighteen doctors in the city, one was still at work by the end: five dead, twelve fled. Those men were plague doctors in the job sense. They did not wear the costume and the beak at that time.

A 1373 note by Johannes Jacobi recommends masks for physicians. It does not describe them. No surviving evidence puts the bird mask in the fourteenth century. The plague doctor costume people think of is three hundred years later.

The Plague Never Fully Went Away 

The bacterium did not leave with the end of Black Death. Europe had plague outbreaks for centuries after 1353. Most were local. Some were bad enough to empty quarters of a city. The name “Great Plague” is not a second Black Death. In English it usually refers to the London epidemic of 1665–1666, with about 100,000 dead in the city, roughly a quarter of its population. Other places had their own great plagues: Naples and Rome in 1656, Vienna in 1679, and Marseille in 1720. Same organism, but less wide-spread. By then towns had boards of health, quarantine, and pesthouses. They also had the outfit.

The Beak of the Plague Doctor

Charles de Lorme, physician to Louis XIII, described the kit during a Paris outbreak in 1619. Waxed Moroccan goat leather: long coat, breeches joined to boots, gloves, hat. A mask with glass over the eyes and a beak about half a foot long, packed with herbs, vinegar, perfume, or theriac, a compound of dozens of ingredients that included viper flesh, myrrh, cinnamon, and honey. The idea was miasma, the bad air carried the pestilence. A long beak was supposed to give the herbs time to clean the breath before it reached the lungs. He also carried a rod, to point, to lift a sheet, or to keep a patient off him.

Paul Fürst, Der Doctor Schnabel von Rom

The picture that fixed the figure is later. In 1656, during the plague of Rome and Naples, Paul Fürst published an engraving of Doctor Schnabel von Rom, Plague Doctor of Rome. The doctor in the print frightens the living and picks over the dead. Naples lost about 300,000 people that year, roughly half the city. The beak was already a sign that the house you were entering was finished.

The costume was never standard issue. Most physicians who treated plague did not wear it. Some did. Two masks survive, both from seventeenth century Germany. The look lasted as a warning longer than it lasted as equipment. It appears again in images of the 1720 Marseille outbreak. After that it belongs to prints, theater, and masks.

The theory under it was wrong. The beak did not stop the fleas. A waxed coat may have kept some fleas off a man’s skin. That would have been an accident of the leather, not a success of the herbs. Pneumonic cases would have made it through the herbs and perfume unchanged.

The role is older than the costume. Cities were already paying men to walk into plague houses in 1348. The beak is a seventeenth-century object, tied to de Lorme’s 1619 description, the 1656 image from Italy, and the surviving masks from Germany. 

Current Events

The plague did not retire with the last European city outbreak. It still moves in rodent populations in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, including the United States. Cases still occur. Antibiotics stop it if they are given before the blood or the lungs are gone. 

 

In early October 2026 a Russian researcher at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Siberia died of a pneumonia that authorities are denying is tied to the pathogens she handled. The institute does work with Yersinia pestis. Contacts were watched. Official tests report no spread. The cause of her death is still unconfirmed as this is being written, and WHO is investigating. 

 

Suggested Reading:

• John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death. Narrative history of the fourteenth-century pandemic for a general reader.
• Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History. The demographic case for the high death toll.
• Paul Slack, Plague: A Very Short Introduction. Short, sober map of the disease from Justinian’s plague through the later European outbreaks.
• William Rosen, Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. The earlier pandemic, sixth century, same bacterium, different world.

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The Men Who Sold the Dead

Dear Shadow Tribe,

My Waterloo teeth post asked what the living took from the dead and placed into the mouths of the living. This is the direct sequel: the body itself, not just the teeth.

From the mid-1700s into the 1830s, medical schools in Britain needed fresh bodies to teach anatomy. They could not get enough legally, so a trade grew up to fill the gap:  body snatching. The men in it were called Resurrection Men. They did not bring anyone back dead. Instead, they dug them up and sold them.

The shortage was written into the law. After 1752, the only bodies a school could take legally were those of executed murderers, handed over by the court for dissection. Hangings did not keep pace with the needs of the schools. London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow were turning out more surgeons every year, and each student was expected to dissect a corpse. There simply weren't enough even if they shared. 

A Legal Loophole

The workaround sat in a loophole in the common law. A dead body was not property, therefore you couldn't be charged with with theft. Take the body and leave the linen and coffin in the grave, and you hadn't stolen anything the courts recognized. That was the whole business model. Go in at night, work fast, pull the corpse out, refill the grave so it looked untouched, and be gone before dawn. Relatives hired watchers. Churches built iron cages, called mortsafes, over new graves. Gangs of  body snatchers still worked because the price was worth the risk.

 

Mortsafes, photo by Judy Wilson

A body in London in the 1810s and 1820s typically brought four to twelve guineas, sometimes more in the teaching season, when cold weather also kept the goods usable. A guinea was twenty-one shillings. A weaver in the East End might clear five shillings a week. Split among a gang of three or four, one night’s work could still beat a month of more honest labor. The big London outfit, the Borough Gang of Ben Crouch, supplied St Thomas’s and St Bartholomew’s teaching hospitals, and the private anatomy schools. 

 

One of the Resurrection Men, Joseph Naples, kept a diary for 1811–12. It reads like a delivery ledger: which churchyard, which hospital, what was paid, who had to be bribed to look the other way. The schools were the customers. They asked few questions and paid cash.

Burke and Hare, and Murder 

Edinburgh, Scotland, ran the same market, just smaller tighter, and even more macabre. In November 1827 a tenant died in a lodging house in Tanner’s Close owing back rent. No family came for the body. William Hare and his wife ran the house, and they sold the body to Dr Robert Knox, the most popular anatomy lecturer in the city, for £7 10s. Knox wanted a steady supply and taught in the Paris style, which meant a corpse for the students, not a diagram.

William Burke was a lodger and laborer who lived at that same lodging house. Burke and Hare did the arithmetic and skipped the churchyard entirely. Over the next ten months they killed sixteen people, mostly poor, old, drunk, or alone, the sort of folks nobody would miss quickly. The method was suffocation: one held the victim down, the other closed the mouth and nose. No wounds, so the body still looked like a natural death when it reached the table. The word “burking” came out of that. Knox’s assistants paid £8 to £10 a body and did not inspect too closely. Hare turned king’s evidence. Burke was hanged on 28 January 1829, then dissected in public. His skeleton is still in Edinburgh. Knox was never charged. The crowd burned him in effigy anyway.

Bishop, Williams, and May: the London Burkers

London eventually produced its own murderous gang. John Bishop, Thomas Williams, and James May already worked the churchyards. Bishop later claimed five hundred to a thousand bodies over twelve years, sold to St Bartholomew’s, St Thomas’s, and King’s College. In November 1831 they brought a suspiciously fresh boy to King’s College and asked twelve guineas. The school offered nine and then noticed the body had not been buried. Bishop and Williams were hanged that December. May was transported. The papers called them the London Burkers.

Parliament had tolerated grave robbery for decades because the schools needed the bodies and the victims were mostly poor. Murder made the arrangement indefensible. The Anatomy Act of 1832 did not stop the body snatching. It changed who did it and who got paid. Unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospitals could now be sent to the schools by law. The Resurrection Men lost their market almost overnight. The supply became the poor who died with no one to claim them, and the payment was made to an institution instead of a gang.

The living needed something the dead still had. The schools needed subjects. The gangs needed cash. After 1832 the state needed the schools supplied without a scandal. The corpse was the goods in every version of the deal. Only the middleman changed.

Similar questions as the teeth: If the only way to train the surgeon who might cut on you later was a body taken from someone who could not refuse, whose body should it be, and who should be allowed to sell it?

Suggested Reading

• Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987, revised 2001)
• Sarah Wise, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London (2004)
• Lisa Rosner, The Anatomy Murders (2009)

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Spearfinger (U'tlun'ta), Stone Witch of Whiteside Mountain

Dear Shadow Tribe,

 

Visiting the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina? Beware of Spearfinger, the stone witch of Whiteside Mountain. The one who eats human liver. The Cherokee families had a name for her before any park road cut the Appalachian ridges: U'tlun'ta. It means someone who has a sharp part on them. In her case, a finger. English turned that into Spearfinger.

The fullest early write-up in English comes from James Mooney, a Smithsonian researcher who sat with Cherokee storytellers in the late 1800s and published Myths of the Cherokee in 1900 (Amazon link). 

Image by Grok, xAI.

She looks like an old woman. The difference is the body. Her skin is stone. Arrows break on it. On her right hand the forefinger is a long awl of bone. She keeps that hand closed or hidden under a robe. The closed fist is where her heart sits. She can also pick up huge rocks and stick them together just by knocking one against the other. Because of her stone hide she is sometimes called Stone-dress. She is not a giant, though she can do giant-like things. Mooney adds a warning that later writers ignore: there was another stone-covered killer in these mountains, and that one is a different story.

She eats human liver.

She does not have to chase. She simply becomes whoever gets close to her, perhaps a grandmother, mother or aunt. She calls the children over and offers to comb their hair. The finger works through the hair until the child sleeps. Then the awl goes in at the neck or the chest, the liver comes out, and the skin closes. No cut. No pain at the time. The child walks home, sickens over the next few days, and dies.

Hunters who met her away from the towns heard her singing to herself:

Uwe′la nátsĭkû′. Su′ să′ sai′. Liver, I eat it. Su′ să′ sai′.

The first line is the boast. Su′ să′ sai′ is the chant under it. It works like a drumbeat, not a second sentence.

Her footsteps on the ridges carried like thunder down into the towns along the Little Tennessee River. Birds flew up ahead of her. When the birds scattered and the thunder rolled, people knew she was on the move.

The Pit

The towns finally called a council. Mooney names Tomotley, Tenase, Settico, Chota, and their neighbors. They dug a deep pit, lined it with sharpened stakes, hid it under brush, and sent up a thick column of smoke. From Chilhowee Mountain she saw the smoke, thought the people were roasting chestnuts, and came at a run. Her feet knocked loose rock off the ridge. Up close she still looked like a frail old woman from the next town. She stepped on the cover and fell in.

The stakes shattered. The arrows shattered. She cut at them with her spearfinger from the bottom of the hole.

A titmouse landed overhead and sang a note that sounded like the word for heart. The warriors shot her chest and wasted their points. They cut that bird's tongue out for lying. Mooney says it flew straight up and never came back, and that the titmouse in the woods now is only a copy of the liar.

Then a chickadee dropped onto the closed right hand. One warrior took the hint and drove a point into the joint where the stone finger met the wrist. The hidden heart split. She fell. They cut the hand off and hung it outside the town as a warning to the other stone beings.

That is why the chickadee is called a truth-teller by the Cherokee. If it lands by the house while someone is away, the old reading is that he is coming home safe.

Cherokee storytellers still tell this. A later Eastern Band version, from Kathi Smith Littlejohn (Amazon link), keeps the same ending and lets a boy learn the secret after he frees a trapped bird. Same stone hide. Same hidden heart.

Where She Walked

Her home mountain in the old account is Whiteside, above the Cashiers and Highlands country in Jackson County (where I once lived, though I never met her). Cherokee speakers treated it as a thunder mountain. She also used the dark passes of the Nantahala, and on the Tennessee side the gap where Chilhowee comes down toward the Little Tennessee. One spot in that country still carried her name in the late 1800s: Spearfinger Place, in what is now Blount County.

She tried to shorten the walk. From a cliff called the Tree Rock on the Hiwassee, she started a bridge of stone through the air toward Whiteside. It reached too close to the world above. Lightning broke it. The people Mooney talked to said the broken pieces still lay along that ridge, and that anyone who went there could point them out. 

Suggested Reading

• James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900). 
• H. ten Kate, "Legends of the Cherokees," Journal of American Folklore (1889). A Western Cherokee version under the name Uilata.
• Barbara R. Duncan, ed., Living Stories of the Cherokee (1998). Includes Kathi Smith Littlejohn's "Spearfinger."

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Introducing Brother Cael, the Wandering Monk

Dear Shadow Tribe,

Brother Cael

Today the bookshelf gains a third plague doctor, Brother Cael (Amazon link). Erasmus still keeps the desk like a Renaissance scholar who wandered in and refused to leave. Corvus still walks the hedge roads in resin and paint. The new one is younger, thinner, and dressed for the road rather than the study. I am naming him Brother Cael, a monk but not yet a priest, walking the back roads bringing healing to the poor. 

He arrived as a hand-painted resin figure: wide studded hat, bronze beak, one glass eye behind the rim, gray robe, a satchel at the hip, prayer beads and a bell at the chest, more bells on the belt, a tank on his back, and a fumigator for the sickroom in his hand. He is a younger generation of plague doctor than Erasmus and Corvus. He has kept up with germ theory. He does not look like a city physician. He looks like a monk who left the enclosure and kept walking. Because he is.

Brother Cael

Cael carries two roots. I'm keeping both.

In Latin, caelum is sky and heaven. A rare clipped form, cael, shows up in old verse. To anyone who reads the hours in Latin, he is the brother under heaven, the one who still looks up.

In Irish, Cáel means slender. It is an old descriptive name, and in the Fenian tales Cáel is a warrior of the Fianna. That is the Celtic half, and it fits. He is young. Months on the road have already worn him thin.

He will not correct either reading.

The Road

Irish monks once practiced peregrinatio: they left the monastery on purpose and walked for Christ, sometimes with no plan to return. Cael is on that road. He brings what a monk-physician of the roads can actually bring. Herbs. Vinegar in the beak. A lancet. A fumigator. The psalms. A prayer. The Word of God in the language the people speak.

His mask is a tool against stench and bad air, not a costume. The fumigator is for the sickroom, not for show. The bells mark him coming up the hollow so no one has to guess what is at the door.

Erasmus haunts the books. Corvus gathers what the ditches still offer after dark. Cael keeps the hours on the road and stops where he is needed. He is not fallen unless the house that sent him decides he left without leave. Wandering is enough.

He claims a place with the other two. On the first night the censer was cold. By morning it smelled faintly of vinegar and dried herbs, which is either the paint or Cael settling in. I am not asking which.

Is he only resin? Maybe. The shelf is more crowded than it was, and the house is a little more watched. In House Shadowlight, that is rarely a complaint.

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