Doctor History Dispatch

I don't really think of myself as a writer of historical fiction, even though the Beat Street series is set in the 1950s and I've written plays set in the past too. I also set plays in the present so I would never think of myself as exclusively wedded to one time (or genre, for that matter).

But history has always interested me, as I know it interests many writers, because we just can't help wondering what people were doing back then. Some traditions are so weird they invite curiosity--like the long-beaked masks doctors wore in earlier centuries.

I was thinking about doctors now, I guess, having been seeing them more than I'd like lately, and thinking about what's different now than in the past. I've heard they wore those odd masks to guard against "bad air" believed to be the cause of the plague and other illnesses. 

It makes sense that doctors would want to armor up with herbs and masks if they were afraid of bad air making them sick. I also remember stories about using leeches to thin people's blood and how in some cases that worked (while in others, not so much).

THAT makes me think of something someone said in a group I attended with my son once for families of cancer patients. He said, "Medicine is really an art, not a science."

I think there is a lot of science in medicine, but I believe part of it IS an art as well, and I'm not sure how doctors approach that. (Not sure how artists approach science, exactly, either). Science is supposed to be based on cold, hard facts, but to get there, it seems to me you have to go through a lot of trial and error, while artists work a lot on instinct, on what our gut is telling us to do.

All of THIS makes me think about how when you write a story in a historical era, you need to think about WHY you are setting it in the past, and how that past informs the present. Setting book 2 of the Beat Street series (not out yet, but coming) in the time of the Blacklist made it easier to show how some of the hysteria of that age (with it's terror of Communists) might inform our own (with its terror of immigrants).

When all is said and done though, I'm still not sure what I think of those medieval doctor masks, except that in every age, we are likely doing something that people in the future will call primitive and misguided.

Cool-looking masks though. May have to use them in a story some time. We'll see.


Medieval doctor mask photo: Thomas Quine


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