Sightings:
The New Yorker gets in on the act, 30 August 2021 (not one of the magazine’s funniest japes but ya can’t have everything):
Pleased to announce that the Trojans at Treadwater Industries have prepared a fresh batch of Plague Doctor postcards, documenting Dr Schnabel’s further attempts to locate the source of this confounding pestilence. The good doctor’s investigations have led him to some strange and, even, exotic places but they haven’t, yet, led him astray. Time and again, the wily virus slips his net by changing its shape. This, Treadwater’s third or Gamma edition, documents some recent skirmishes. Rest assured: our boffins are fine-tuning a Delta variant even now.
View gallery of images on the Merchandise page.
13 July 2021
Doctor at Large
It’s been a busy year for the Doctor. The poor fella’s been run off his feet, marching eagle-eyed all along the watchtower and scouring every unlooked nook beneath. Exhausting. The damn stuff’s harder to spot than them needles which hang out in haystacks – and spotting it’s the easy part. Once you’ve got it locked in your crosshairs, you still can’t pull the trigger. First, you gotta find where it’s been. Give it the third degree. The damn stuff’s not gonna roll over and let you tickle its tum. It’s not gonna blab on command. This is an existential engagement, a matter of life and death. The Doc’s gotta use all his investigative savvy, all the tricks of the micro-detection trade, to ferret the damn stuff’s history. E’en so, the Doc don’t forget his obligations, to his family and his friends from the prior life. He’s seen here, on the hoof, posting his weekly bulletin to his everlovin’ intimates. You could do likewise. You could even use Doc-sanctioned stationery to get your message across. That’s available here:
<https://www.treadwaterpress.com/shop>
Dave Western, chronicler of London’s vanishing laundrettes, culverted rivers and much more besides, has paid tribute to the Doctor’s heroic ministry by preparing a Lino cut of his peculiar victory dance. Dave’s dispensed with Doc’s magic wand and has him juggling a black globe instead. Is that a football-in-mourning or our raddled planet? Visit Dave’s website at <www.davidwestern.co.uk/home/4544197701> to see more of his work.
Clothing against Death
Dr Schnabel from Rome by Paulus Fürst (Nuremberg), 1656. The caption “Columbina ad vivum delineavit” translates as “Columbina, drawn from life”, a sarcastic reference to the stock character from the Commedia dell’Arte who was both wife to Pierrot and lover of the trickster, Harlequin.
Believe it or not, the Doctor has his detractors, a miserable nit-picking crew who can’t bring themselves to acknowledge his sterling public service. They’ve been at it since 1656, when the plague was raging through Rome and Naples, accusing the Doc’s forebears of only being in it for the money. They were still improvising their own PPE at the time! German engraver Gerhard Altzenbach recorded the costume: the waxed fabric cassock, the avian face mask with its distinctive beak, the gloved, taloned fingers, the fastidious wand! They’re all there in that year’s fashion plate-in-the-making Clothing Against Death. Fellow German Paulus Fürst took one look and immediately took the piss, flipping the image and adding his own satiric touches: batwings! An hourglass! A glimpse of the Doctor menacing a bunch of pastoral kids! He gave the figure a nickname – “Dr Schnabel”: Dr Beaky, Dr Beaky from Rome – shorthand for “a meddler, a pedant and a Catholic”! A peddler of infallible edicts and expert advice, unwanted in Protestant Nuremburg. Fürst also added a poem, mocking the Doc’s scientific pretensions:
Should I believe in a fable
Put about by Dr Schnabel
Who escapes the contagion
And yet profits
From the corpses he finds
Like a crow feasting on carrion?
Ah, Faith! Don’t desert me
Lest the Heavens rain down pestilence!
Who wouldn’t shrink
From his nifty cudgel
Or gawp dumbstruck at
His high-and-mighty decrees?
How many embrace the blind faith
That this black devil promotes?
His idea of Hell is an empty wallet
Gold has stolen his soul
[Freely translated from the Latin, German and what-have-you of the original
by Bleddyn Butcher, 1 December 2020]
Schnabel’s fable, we now know, was wrong: the bubonic plague [yersina pestis] was not spread by bad air or miasmic vapours but by all-too-tangible rats and fleas. Even so, the Doctor’s precautions (wearing protective clothing, keeping strategic distance) were practical and, to some extent, effective. His reasoning and tentative theories [sein Consilium] were far better founded than the Church’s knee-jerk diagnosis: that the scourge was a Divine punishment. The Doc was on the right track but too far ahead of his time. Now that we’ve uncovered a virus which thrives on aerosol broadcast, his bird mask has finally come into its own.
Clothing against Death by Gerhart Altzenbach (Cologne), 1656
© Bleddyn Butcher, 2020/2021