12/19/2023 0 Comments History of the plague doctorThis can lead us to think about the ways they started to materialize as “masks” in the strict sense of the term. ![]() What is important is not so much to locate the first “mask” used against disease, but rather to discuss how ideas, practices, and imaginations of face-covering devices emerged in different social and epistemic contexts. So there is a material continuity in place on the one hand, and an ontological, symbolic and epistemic discontinuity on the other, making it crucial to study their interplay and its material, aesthetic, social and behavioral impact on the ground. But all these cases were meant to protect doctors from a plague imagined as miasma, or “bad air.” What we see, by contrast, in the course of the third pandemic, already by 1900, is the use of face-covering devices against bacteria. Similarly, following the Vetlianka plague epidemic in Russia in the late 1870s, doctors published designs of hazmat-like anti-plague uniforms involving complex respirators. We know from oil paintings that people burying plague corpses in Marseille in 1721 wore cloths around their mouth and nose. (Ōsakashiritsu Momoyama Byōin 1987: 222.)Ĭhristos: This is a difficult question, as it depends on what we mean by “plague masks.” The image that comes to mind immediately is that of the “Beaked Doctor.” These early modern physicians wore masks when examining plague patients, which were meant to protect them from miasma. Plague Outbreak, Momoyama Hospital, Osaka, Japan, c. ![]() 5 Christos, do you know of any other cases of early plague masks?įigure 1. 4 In Japan, doctors and quarantine officers had already begun to wear masks during the plague epidemic in Osaka in 1899–1900, especially after two doctors and one quarantine officer died from the pneumonic plague in January 1900 (Figure 1). 3 Christos’ research article in Medical Anthropology had been more carefully written. Wu Liande, a Cambridge-educated doctor and the inventor of the so-called “Wu’s mask” during the Manchurian plague, himself mentioned masks that preceded his, in places such as Germany and Japan. In his latest article, published by the New York Times in February 2020, he wrote: “nti-epidemic masks as we know them today were invented in China more than a century ago, during the Chinese state’s first effort to contain an epidemic by biomedical means.” 1 So, I wrote in Gendai Shisō, “the use of masks by medical personnel for the purpose of disease prevention began with the Manchurian plague in 1910–1912.” 2 After its publication, several Chinese scholars, including Meng, made me realize that I was mistaken. Tomo: When I first started writing on the history of masks for the Japanese journal Gendai Shisō, I read several articles by Christos. In a conversation between these three scholars, they discuss their research on the history of plague masks in East Asia. Christos Lynteris’ work on plague masks has inspired Tomohisa Sumida and Meng Zhang to trace the history of masks in Japan and China, respectively. As masks began attracting increased attention in 2020, historians of science and anthropologists began independently investigating the situated histories of this iconic artifact.
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