Plague Doctor

Dimensions:
Overall height:  73 inches  (1.85 meters)
Encompassing diameter:  48 inches (1.22 meters)

Weight:
385 pounds (175 kilograms)

Materials Used:
Bronze resin over copper armature.

Techniques Used:
A 200 pound piece of native granite was drilled to receive copper piping making a framework to receive successive small batches of catalyzed epoxy resin. The whole was then spray painted with acrylic lacquer yielding a cast bronze finish.

Description:
N/A

What the artist is trying to say:
Without a doubt, the predominant societal condition of today relates to the COVID-19 pandemic. Plague Doctor is exceedingly poignant to medicine at this time of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic. It dramatically harkens back to the great Black Death Plagues of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. The piece is modeled after the plague doctor garb developed by Dr. Charles de Lorme, physician to Kings Louis XIII & XIV of France, and Catherine de Medici among others. The garb is very much like the PPE worn by health care professionals during the current pandemic.

The sculpture Plague Doctor VISUALLY illustrates how physicians become icons of social advice and solace during epidemics in all ages.

Black Death Plague was thought to be caused by "Bad Air" and the prominent beak of the Plague Doctor garb was stuffed with medicinal herbs in an effort to filter out the Bad Air. This erroneous belief amazingly persisted until the bacterium "Yersinia pestis" was discovered in 1896 as the causative organism. The beaked mask of the Plague Doctor is directly analogous to the masks everyone is wearing today.