To purify the air around them, they would burn rosemary and hot tar. These scents, wafting through winding streets of London, were so common during the Great Plague of the 17th century that they became synonymous with the plague itself, historians said.
Some plague doctors wore a special costume consisting of an ankle-length overcoat and a bird-like beak mask. As an attempt to purify the air they breathe, the wearer would fill the mask with herbs and spices (commonly lavender).
Since the plague was thought to spread by “bad air”, homes were fumigated with incense or simply smoke from burning thatch. People carried bouquets of flowers which they held to their faces, not only to ward off the stench of decomposing bodies, but because it was thought this would fumigate one's lungs.
Rosemary, tansy, lavender, carnation, and feverfew was a popular combination. People carried their posey with them to quickly deploy under their nose should they come across a foul smell that might carry the miasma of the plague.
Plague doctors also completely covered themselves from head to toe, and may have carried incense or other burning herbs to ward off the plague.
The miasma theory of contagious disease held that sickness spread through unpleasant aromas. A whiff of 'bad air' could kill you – and the right fragrance just might save your life. A physician wearing a 17th-century plague preventive. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Doctors also treated the Black Death in accordance with the prevailing beliefs of the time. They relied on astrology, herbal ointment, sweet-smelling herbs and the practice of attaching leeches to patients.
However, some people experience a change to their sense of smell about three to four months following infection. People report certain things—like food or body odor—smelling like garbage, rotten eggs, or chemicals. This altered sense of smell is called parosmia.
Why or why not? The smell of fresh human tissue and blood remains with you for days after the first few autopsies. As the years go by, we get used to that smell and concentrate our attention on determining the cause of death.
Many funeral homes actually smell like flower shops since there are often flowers all over the place. These aren't just any flowers, either. There are some very specific flowers that people will usually send to a funeral home following a person's death.
Even common invalid foods, like mutton broth, were recommended to have herbs such as rosemary, mint or thyme added to help ward off the disease.
Leech Blood-Letting
The most popular attempt to cure the plague was bloodletting using leeches. It was thought that the leeches would draw out the bad blood that caused the disease and leave the good blood in the body.
Miasma. Some people carried bunches of flowers or burned herbs to purify the air. Some priests ran away from their parishes - refusing to give funerals to infected bodies. They thought the bodies gave off miasma.
The mask had two small nose holes and was a type of respirator which contained aromatic items. The beak could hold dried flowers (commonly roses and carnations), herbs (commonly lavender and peppermint), camphor, or a vinegar sponge, as well as juniper berry, ambergris, cloves, labdanum, myrrh, and storax.
The first person to treat the bubonic plague was a man named Alexandre Yersin. Yersin first cultured the bacteria in 1894. In 1895, he worked with Émile Roux, Albert Calmette and Amédée Borrel and the treatment was given to patients in 1896.
The prevailing “science” of the day concluded that the plague was spread by pestilential miasma (disease ridden air). That's right, the disease was thought to spread by a foul odor. So it made sense that prevention and treatment methods often included burning juniper, dried herbs, and other plants with pleasant aromas.
Bodies at formal open casket funerals will not smell bad due to having been embalmed shortly after death. However, smells such as perfumes or flowers may be common at an open casket funeral. Bodies with unavoidable smells will typically not be offered an open casket funeral.
Your body odor can change due to hormones, the food you eat, infection, medications or underlying conditions like diabetes. Prescription-strength antiperspirants or medications may help.
“I remove your tongue during an autopsy – we need to make sure you didn't bite down on it, make sure you don't have drugs in the back of your throat. “So if you have a tongue ring, that one comes out, but nipples, nose, ears, eyebrow, private parts...”
The term for this type of olfactory hallucination is dysosmia. Common causes of dysosmia are head and nose injury, viral damage to the smell system after a bad cold, chronic recurrent sinus infections and allergy, and nasal polyps and tumors.
An olfactory hallucination (phantosmia) makes you detect smells that aren't really there in your environment. The odors you notice in phantosmia are different from person to person and may be foul or pleasant. You may notice the smells in one or both nostrils.
Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersinia pestis. (The French biologist Alexandre Yersin discovered this germ at the end of the 19th century.)
The world's first known plague victim was a 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer in Europe. The skull of the man buried in Riņņukalns, Latvia, around 5,000 years ago. Humanity has been ravaged by the plague – one of the deadliest bacterial infections in history – for thousands of years.
The first wave, called the Black Death in Europe, was from 1347 to 1351. The second wave in the 1500s saw the emergence of a new virulent strain of the disease.