The plague doctor outfit as we know it was invented in the seventeenth century by Charles de Lorme, a man that early modern historian Estelle Paranque describes in an article for
Art UK as being “a talented physician who treated thousands of people during the reigns of three different French kings.” This means that de Lorme’s sartorial creation was a few centuries too late to be medieval, and while it was indeed designed for doctors caring for patients with the bubonic plague, “the Black Death” refers specifically to the pandemic that occurred in the mid-fourteenth century. But was the outfit really as crude as modern popular conception makes it out to be?